A remarkable testament to the power of investigative journalism in the face of lies and careless rumor.
An investigative review of the notorious Beslan massacre that thoroughly pieces together a version of what really happened, debunking long-standing mythology along the way.
Burakov, in his journalistic debut, wanted to present the whole truth, following the evidence wherever it led. The result is a fearless examination that anatomizes every available shred of evidence and relentlessly interrogates every rumor that previously masqueraded as fact. In September 2004, armed assailants stormed a school in Beslan, North Ossetia. They planted explosives and took hundreds of hostages, many of them students. Burakov scrutinizes the nature of the terrorist organization that perpetrated the attack, then compares the roles of the local police versus the Federal Security Service of Russia and tries to discern the true cause of the catastrophic explosions that took place in the gymnasium. He grimly reveals the full extent of the casualties, which mortify the official number. Helpfully, the book provides ample background information, detailing the region’s troubled history from the 18th century through two Chechen wars and up to the present. The reasons for the current welter of misinformation regarding the Beslan massacre turn out to be as morbidly fascinating as the massacre itself: a grotesque amalgam of Russian governmental spin, contradictory witness accounts, and the bias of the Western press. In the aftermath of the debacle, rhetoric about the massacre became a craven political tool. “With the Russian government maintaining silence, the informational space related to coverage of Beslan naturally came under the control of sources in opposition to the government and to the President. The massive smear campaign resulted in unofficial alliances of parties so dissimilar in nature that it would almost be unimaginable for them to work together in any other situation.” And, he says, the battle for truth isn’t over. “Remnants of the fight have continued for years after the crisis and have shifted to social media causing the splitting of the Internet world into pro- and anti-government camps.” What emerges from Burakov’s analysis is much more than a vivid picture of one terrible event; it’s also a look at an entire region in the throes of dysfunction.
A remarkable testament to the power of investigative journalism in the face of lies and careless rumor.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1500400965
Page Count: 420
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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