Historical writing and political analysis of the highest order.
Essential history of a multifaceted political movement that ended in tears in many places—but endures in many others.
There are few people more qualified than Brown (Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective, 2007, etc.) to write authoritatively on the communist states of the world; during a 40-year career he has studied in most of the principal powers. Many of them, he notes, are no longer communist. The remaining five—China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam—are more different than alike in critical respects of governance. Brown charts the origins of communism to pre-Marxist millenarianism. With the work of Marx and Engels the doctrine solidified and codified, though it would be transformed in the hands of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao Zedong. The author notes Trotsky’s famous observation that in Russia, the process of party substitutionism—whereby the party stood in for the working class, the central committee for the party and the head of the central committee for the committee itself—would inevitably lead to dictatorship. So it did, with Stalin’s police arresting nearly 1.7 million Soviet citizens in 1937–38 alone, executing at least 818,000 of them. Communists are as famous as any other ideologues for intramural squabbles, as Brown observes, such that many refuse to acknowledge that communism has ever held power—since “ ‘communism’ was to be the ultimate stage of socialism which they never claimed to have reached”—and many others claim to have the lock on the true form of the doctrine (think Kim Jong Il). Brown’s analysis of these various strains of belief is spot-on, but the best part of the book comes at the close, when he undertakes a nearly blow-by-blow account of the end of the Soviet regime behind the closed doors of the Kremlin, the subsequent fall of a dozen communist states and a host of unintended consequences—including the reunification of Germany, which “the most committed opponents of the regime in East Germany, including those who led the demonstrations in October 1989,” had not really wanted.
Historical writing and political analysis of the highest order.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-113879-9
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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 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
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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