Reminding us that Americans do not hold the monopoly on conspiracy theories, Knight analyzes the dramatic events and repercussions surrounding the murder of Sergei Kirov. In December of 1934, Leningrad Party Chief and leading Communist Kirov was murdered in a deserted corridor of party headquarters by a disenchanted ex-Communist named Nikolaev. The mysteries of the assassination are fascinating and myriad. Kirov’s bodyguard, who was somehow detained further down the corridor and didn—t even witness the murder, died en route to an interview with Stalin the next day, allegedly as the result of falling out of the truck in which he was being transported. Kirov’s office had been relocated to a distant portion of the main corridor while he was away. How could Nikolaev have entered the building unnoticed? These are but a few of the enigmas that arise on opening this Pandora’s box. There have been countless attempts to solve the case, from Stalin’s arrival in Leningrad the day after the murder to investigations headed by Khrushchev and Gorbachev. In this, her latest book dealing with the Soviet secret police, Knight (Spies Without Cloaks: The KGB’s Successors, 1996, etc.) draws a compelling picture of Kirov—a bright man and a gifted orator who rose from childhood poverty and incarceration under the tsarist regime to the highest levels of Communist leadership. In Knight’s view, the Kirov murder case served as a prototype of party and secret police complicity. Not only did Stalin use the murder to launch a campaign against Leningrad, she contends, but he planned it as a pretext for launching his massive purges. “No one, it seems, was untouched by what had happened on the first of December 1934.” Thus the Kirov murder raised questions for the entire nation about its leadership’s legitimacy. While some experts might argue with Knight’s conclusions, general readers will be drawn to her narrative of this fascinating case and its continued grip on the Soviet/Russian political imagination. (26 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8090-6404-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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