An elucidating work of research that resonates amid another ongoing intervention involving Russia.
A thorough reconsideration of a conveniently forgotten “sideshow” to World War I: an ill-fated two-year attempt by the Allies to reverse the Bolshevik Revolution.
Historian Reid, author of The Shaman’s Coat, revisits a humiliating “little war” that ended with few tangible gains—other than independence for Latvia and Estonia—and did nothing to reverse the Bolshevik takeover of Russia. The fall of the tsarist regime at first came as a relief to the Allies then fighting Germany in WWI, yet when the ascendant revolutionary Reds, among the warring factions battling tsarist Whites, made the “outrageous” treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk in late 1917, the Allies grew alarmed. Up to that point, they had taken a “wait and see” attitude toward how the leadership would shake out in Russia—until they decided to secure the ports at Murmansk and Vladivostok. Reluctant U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was persuaded to send troops to help Czechs wipe out pockets of resistance and secure the Trans-Siberian railroad. Reid unearths significant information on the White-sponsored (and British-condoned) antisemitic pogroms across Ukraine and elsewhere that took place in 1919. “Even at the distance of a century, with 1919’s killings long overshadowed by the Holocaust,” writes the author, “the fact that Britain knowingly funded, supplied, trained and sent men to fight alongside the armies that committed them is shocking and shameful.” Reid also knowledgeably chronicles the work of various Allied officers and Russians involved in the war, including their somewhat comic interactions and clashes of culture. The intervention ultimately involved 180,000 Allied troops from 15 countries; by 1920, Britain and America had moved on to domestic crises. The author astutely points out that the intervention contributed to “Europe’s fragmentation between the wars”—and later fed the Nazi demonization of Jews.
An elucidating work of research that resonates amid another ongoing intervention involving Russia.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781541619661
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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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