A true profile in courage, written with verve and wit.
How one man took on a tyrant.
Navalny suffered greatly during his short life as an activist and opposition leader. He required months of recovery after a near-fatal poisoning, he needed surgery on his right eye after an assailant threw an antiseptic in his face, and he was placed in solitary confinement and endured a 24-day hunger strike during his final imprisonment, which ended with his unexplained death on Feb. 16, 2024. As President Biden said in condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin, the man Navalny had tormented for years, “there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did.” In reading Navalny’s posthumous memoir—written before and during his time behind bars, sections secreted out of prison—one feels a deep sense of not only sorrow over the loss of such a magnetic figure, but also awe for this man’s extraordinary resolve. His rebellion began early. As he recounts in his enormously appealing voice, he grew up in a family that talked politics. A formative experience was seeing how ordinary citizens were lied to by the government after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. And then there was music—“the crucial source of ideological sabotage that subverted me and turned me into a little dissident.” Aside from reading, his favorite pastime was setting off explosives—a fitting precursor to the metaphorical bombs he would ignite in exposing corrupt politicians and tycoons who engorged themselves in the kleptocratic state that supplanted the USSR. Navalny was justifiably angered by the “unholy horde of hypocritical thieves and lowlifes” who steered his beloved Russia toward totalitarianism. That righteous passion empowered him, but so too did his irrepressible spirit—his humanity and his decency. Every page is alive with Navalny’s ever-present humor, his self-deprecation, his affection for his wife, Yulia, and their children, and his empathy for fellow prisoners. Long after Putin draws his last breath, people will read this aptly titled book, an inestimable record of a heroic life, one that will inspire generations to come.
A true profile in courage, written with verve and wit.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9780593320969
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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