An astute, accessible, illuminating navigation of the idea that the “only consistent feature in Russia’s history is its...
A focused, bracing look at how the control of the media has helped plot the Russian political trajectory from dictatorship and back again.
A Soviet-born insider who hailed the opening up of Russia by Mikhail Gorbachev 30 years ago as creating an “exhilarating new sense of possibility,” Ostrovsky, former Moscow bureau chief at the Economist, is chagrined by the nostalgic return to Soviet ways by the current leadership of Vladimir Putin. The “dismantling of lies” first spelled out in Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes opened a rift between the generation of old-school Communists and those of the shestidesiatniki, “the men of the 1960s,” contemporaries of Gorbachev who wanted “to restore social justice and clear the names of their fathers.” While Gorbachev introduced perestroika as a “new beginning” to fix the broken Soviet Union in 1986, 30 years to the day after Khrushchev’s speech, he “dithered” in terms of moving to a free market and liberalizing state-controlled prices, creating “an unbridgeable divide between the minority of the liberal intelligentsia and…the gray and menacing mass of Soviet-bred men and women” known as Homo soveticus. Ostrovsky effectively demonstrates this divide in the father-son dichotomy of reformer journalist Yegor Yakovlev, “the mouthpiece of Gorbachev’s perestroika,” brought up in the era of “socialism with a human face,” and his son Vladimir Yakovlev, the founding editor of the new capitalist newspaper, Kommersant, started in 1990. Each of these organs defined the tone of the times, along with NTV, a new TV channel started in 1993 by media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky, which presented Western-style “normal” (“uncensored”) news; the station eventually got into hot water after criticizing Putin’s handling of the Chechnya war and was shut down. From oligarchs bred in Boris Yeltin’s administration to the lethal growth of the bureaucrat-entrepreneur under Putin, the grasp of the message became key to controlling the state.
An astute, accessible, illuminating navigation of the idea that the “only consistent feature in Russia’s history is its unpredictability.”Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-56416-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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