A beguiling ride through a riotous time by a historian and able storyteller who knows his facts and his audience.
This chronicle of British undercover push back against Bolshevik world conspiracy proves to be an exciting ringside seat at the Russian Revolution.
With so many astonishing world events transpiring at once as World War I still raged and Lenin returned from exile to foment proletarian revolution in Russia in 1917, accomplished British author Milton (Paradise Lost: Smyrna, 1922, 2008, etc.) does a fine job of keeping order without sparing suspense. The British, rightly alarmed by Lenin’s incendiary rhetoric about toppling British imperialism by aiming at her crown jewel, India, could not spare troops from fighting Germany to counter the Bolshevik Revolution. Instead, the British would have to thwart Lenin’s machinations by wilier ways. These included the work of London’s Secret Service Bureau headed by Mansfield Cumming, who shifted from ordering espionage against Germany to directing Samuel Hoare’s team of agents at the Ministry of War of the Russian Empire, which had been established in 1916 when Russia and England were still allies against Germany. Hoare’s team, consisting of highly capable men of bilingual abilities who had established connections in Russia at the highest levels of business and government, would be involved in a number of perilous and influential events as the revolution unfurled: Oswald Rayner was likely one of the conspirators and even gunmen in the murder of Rasputin; Somerset Maugham was sent in to prop up Alexander Kerensky’s government and keep the Russians at war with Germany; journalist Arthur Ransome was able to infiltrate and chronicle the workings of the Comintern; and Sidney Reilly, master of disguise, put in motion plans for a risky coup. Less well known is the Turkestan theater, where British officers for Indian espionage became London’s eyes and ears as the Bolsheviks made their southern thrusts.
A beguiling ride through a riotous time by a historian and able storyteller who knows his facts and his audience.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-568-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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