A comprehensive, proficient history of “a tale of remarkable engineering stimulated by imperial ambition.”
A survey of an underrated railway line that helped Russia become a world power and also contributed to several revolutions.
British transportation specialist Wolmar (The Great Railroad Revolution: The History of Trains in America, 2012, etc.) certainly knows his stuff, and he asserts that the construction of the Trans-Siberian, the longest railroad in the world, had repercussions across the world—indeed, “it was the railway line that did most to create today’s geopolitical system.” Although imperial Russia came to the idea of building a railroad rather late in the game (England’s Liverpool-Manchester line was the first, in 1830), due to the country’s undeveloped economy and political system, Czar Nicholas I approved an initial, highly successful short line between St. Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo, his summer residence, in 1837, followed by a St. Petersburg-Moscow line. Czar Alexander III embraced modern technology, and though a huge drain on the government coffers, the notion of Russia’s catching up to the West became irresistible; however, it took finance minister Sergei Witte to galvanize forces in 1892. His overarching vision of a Trans-Siberian railroad would help populate Siberia, aid in the transport of resources and troops, and industrialize the country. Witte saw the railroad as the key to economic success and to show that “Russia was the equal of the great powers of Europe.” Wolmar demonstrates how the railroad was built (with much American know-how) over an astonishingly short amount of time—slicing through Manchuria and arousing the ire of the Chinese and Japanese, leading to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904—as well as how officials cut corners by taking curves too sharply and skimping on materials. Nonetheless, it was completed in 1916 and also served to contribute to the Revolution of 1917.
A comprehensive, proficient history of “a tale of remarkable engineering stimulated by imperial ambition.”Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-452-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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 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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