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 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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