A vivid, chilling portrait of a Russia grown “scary and unpredictable.”
A scathing indictment of Vladimir Putin’s “police state” that offers compelling evidence of his absolute suppression of any opposition or exposure of the state’s corruption.
Knight (How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies, 2006, etc.) builds a convincing case for high-level Russian ordering of political murders, from liberal Duma member Galina Starovoitova to outspoken journalist Anna Politkovskaya to opposition leader Boris Nemtsov—among many others. The murder of Kremlin opponents has been a robust tradition since czarist times, gaining Bolshevik impetus under Lenin’s Cheka and ferocious momentum under Stalin’s Great Purge and the notorious long arm of the KGB. Though Boris Yeltsin dissolved the KGB, it was reconfigured by political necessity as the FSB, with former KGB lieutenant Putin as director. Knight looks at the so-called siloviki (those running the “power ministries”) as holding not only the power in the country, but the secrets about one another that maintain that power. When these secrets were revealed—e.g., by journalists or brave government officials investigating Russia’s brutal crackdown in Chechnya or the 1999 “apartment bombings”—the victims were marked and murdered Mafia-style, their deaths blamed on “terrorists.” The 2006 death by poison of former KSB officer–turned-whistleblower Alexander Litvinenko in London created an international scandal. However, as shockingly blatant as the death was—polonium 210 was such a rare and lethal substance that it could only have been procured by the FSB—the lack of political pressure on the Putin regime by the U.S. and elsewhere has been puzzling and outrageous. Essentially, Knight astutely asserts, Putin brazenly invites suspicions on Kremlin involvement “as a way to intimidate those who oppose him.” The author also examines the story of the Tsarnaev brothers, who perpetuated the Boston Marathon bombings and had traveled in Russia, and she concludes with the rule of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who, on Putin’s direction, has taken the police state to Stalinist proportions.
A vivid, chilling portrait of a Russia grown “scary and unpredictable.”Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-11934-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2017
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
