Lovers of Russian literature and music will find this valuable, and history buffs will get a fearsome picture of life under...
Independent senior reporter McSmith (No Such Thing as Society: A History of Britain in the 1980s, 2010, etc.) explores how arts and artists in Russia somehow managed to flourish despite Joseph Stalin’s iron control.
Stalin decided whose work was acceptable. If it was not, it ended up in the ash heap—unless someone, like Pasternak or Gorky, interceded. The only literary style suitable in those days was social realism that lauded the Russian way of life. There were attempts to modernize, such as Sergei Eisenstein’s addition of jazz to his films, and there were successes—e.g., his Battleship Potemkin (1925). Stalin knew that artistic success reflected on his regime, and he obsessively controlled everything, especially movies but also the music of Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Writers of poetry and plays all lived under his vigilance, as well. The greatest poets of the generation, under the eye of the censors, were never sure what would offend. Throughout his oppressive reign, Stalin had no problem sending artists to their deaths. Though he claimed that writers were the engineers of the human soul, every word written, every play or movie proposed was subject to review before, during, and after completion. McSmith shows how many persisted in the worst conditions and even returned after emigrating, for love of the homeland. Perhaps their strength came from knowing how much Russians loved the arts. Osip Mandelstam said, “there’s no place where more people are killed for it.” An epigram he wrote about Stalin was never written down, only recited twice, but the secret services still found out about it. Paranoia was a way of life. The author has a deep affinity for these artists, and his portrayal of their struggles makes our appreciation of them even stronger.
Lovers of Russian literature and music will find this valuable, and history buffs will get a fearsome picture of life under Stalin.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59558-056-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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