Ultimately, the author leaves Siberia with—remarkably—his capitalist fervor intact. (Photographs)
The exploits of an American entrepreneur in the Russian Far East: adventurous, often ingenious, but also bathed in the righteous pomposities of a free-market zealot.
Blakely went to Siberia at the beginning of the 1990s to find excitement and “to help a few Siberians develop into entrepreneurs.” He aimed to be in the forefront of those bringing “democracy and the free market, the best institutions the West had to offer,” to a land known primarily for its gulags. The market did materialize, although hardly free, and democracy wasn’t even an issue. Blakely and his Siberian partner managed to insinuate themselves into the chocolate business, but the trade was hardly based on the putative twin pillars of Western greatness. Blakely isn’t happy with the way he had to do business—all the payoffs and shady dealings—but his partner put it to him bluntly: “If the system is crooked, you have to cheat the system. . . . In a crooked game, you have to play by crooked rules.” But it wasn’t long before the economy was in a shambles and in only a few hands, thanks to pyramid schemes, voucher scams, hyperinflation, organized crime, banking follies, greed, and indifference. It pained Blakely to realize that “money dictated morality, rubles overshadowed responsibilities, and self-indulgence came before self-respect,” but he still figures that capitalism is the best game in town. Indeed, he’s surprised that “given the crooked playing field” and considering “that for seventy years it was a crime against society to earn a profit, it is downright miraculous that every Russian entrepreneur isn’t a con artist or thief,” though some may sense an amount of hot air in such a sentiment. When Blakely takes a breather from his economic morality play, he offers an intimate glimpse of life in Novosibirsk, and readers may wish he had devoted his energies more to exactly such observing.
Ultimately, the author leaves Siberia with—remarkably—his capitalist fervor intact. (Photographs)Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-57071-944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
HISTORY | BUSINESS | WORLD | ECONOMICS | GENERAL BUSINESS | 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 Yorkerstaff 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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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