A decidedly minor contribution to history, but an entertaining read all the same.
Move over, Anastasia: there’s a new alive-after-death Romanov in town, and therein hangs a lively tale.
Troubetzkoy, himself descended from Russian royals, turns up a mystery nearly two centuries old: the putative death at age 48 of Tsar Alexander I, celebrated for having marched his army in the streets of Paris after having helped defeat Napoleon. Everything about the death is suspicious, at least in Troubetzkoy’s eyes. Alexander died in a remote Siberian outpost far from competent doctors and medical examiners. Renowned for his strength, vigor, and various appetites, he had been in apparently splendid health and spirits on leaving the capital not long before. Moreover, the body that was represented as his bore signs of the lash, something no tsar could have been subjected to. Not long after Alexander’s death, a preacher turned up in Siberia who comported himself with military bearing and seemed to resemble the tsar in many ways; this Feodor Kuzmich, though a mendicant starets (holy man), once supposedly received a shipment of two hundred pairs of white silk stockings from Paris—and Alexander was known to have suffered from recurring athlete’s foot. On such evidence, none other than Leo Tolstoy was convinced that Alexander was Kuzmich, and Troubetzkoy capably defends the same view. Why the subterfuge, the faked death to escape from the burdens of the crown? Well, Troubetzkoy suggests, Alexander could have been suffering from a guilty conscience for participating, knowingly or not, in the murder of his father, Tsar Paul, who had been courting Napoleon and who, in the words of Alexander’s brother Constantine, had “declared war on common sense.” From regicide/parricide to supreme ruler and holy man: an odd career path, perhaps, but one that nicely sustains Troubetzkoy’s tale.
A decidedly minor contribution to history, but an entertaining read all the same.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-608-2
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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