by Anatol Lieven ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1998
Russia’s humiliation in the Chechen war forms the basis of a nuanced argument about the end of Russian military and imperial power. Lieven, a reporter on Eastern Europe for the Financial Times, offers a compelling view of Russia’s defeat in Chechnya (based on his eyewitness account of the fighting), as well as a revisionist interpretation of Russia’s role as a global power. The Chechen war, maintains Lieven, is a “key moment in Russian and perhaps world history” because it has highlighted the collapse of Russia’s military might and its imperial power. Throughout his study, Lieven interweaves specifics of the situation in Chechnya (background on Grozny, Dudayev, and the course of the war itself) with a broader look at Russian society (privatization, the new capitalist elites, the Russian army, the nature of Russian nationalism) and the historical roots of the Russian-Chechen conflict. A final section discusses the striking nature of the Chechen victory and raises questions about the military and larger ramifications of clashes between organized armies and rebel fighters. Of all of Lieven’s challenging interpretations, the most forceful is his suggestion that Russian society has fundamentally changed, making it impossible to follow traditional Western approaches that assume lasting continuities in Russian and Soviet history. Another of Lieven’s theses that deserves consideration is that today’s Russia should not be compared with earlier Russian or Soviet periods, but with models of “liberal” states in Latin America and southern Europe a century ago (both in terms of national and economic development). While Lieven falls into political science jargon in these types of discussion, the comparative nature of his analysis enlivens them with thoughtful contrasts. A serious contribution to understanding both the implications of the Chechen war and the broader debate among scholars on appropriate interpretations of Russia’s role in the post—Cold War period ahead of us. (12 illustrations)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-300-07398-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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