A fascinating look into Soviet-era politics, through the lens of art history.
Two British journalists search for a legendary Russian treasure, missing since WWII.
The authors (The Stone of Heaven, 2002) begin in Leningrad, the former tsarist capital, where, in June 1941, Hitler's armies arrived. The staff of the Soviet museums made a valiant effort to rescue the artifacts from the looting Germans. Perhaps the greatest of those treasures was the amber room, given to Tsar Peter I in 1717 by Frederick William, King of Prussia. Made of the fossilized resin of prehistoric plants, the smoky panels of its walls stood 12 feet high, molded and carved in high baroque style. Anatoly Kuchumov, the young Soviet curator in charge of the room, decided to conceal it, hoping the Germans would miss it. No such luck: within three days, the Germans found and dismantled it, shipping it back to Königsberg, the Prussian city near which much of the world's supply of amber is found. There it lay until 1945, when the Red Army came, seeking the return of looted Russian treasures. There the mystery begins. The first Soviet authority sent to investigate reported that the amber room had been destroyed; Kuchumov, following up shortly afterwards, claimed to find evidence that the Nazis had removed it to a safe place—but where? The authors interviewed witnesses and experts in Russia, Germany, and Königsberg. The trail led through archives of the hated East German Stasi, hard-to-obtain documents in Russian research libraries, and to various shadowy figures willing to trade their questionable information for hard cash. In the end, they arrive at a conclusion that challenges the official versions (there are several) of the amber room's final fate. Their answer may disappoint, but their account of the strange and twisting journey is well worth it.
A fascinating look into Soviet-era politics, through the lens of art history.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8027-1424-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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