Reluctant to relinquish America's Cold War mentality, a veteran journalist revives our image of the Soviet Union as the evil empire we loved to hate. At a time when most works on Russia and the Soviet Union are concentrating on contemporaneous events, Satter (who has reported for the Wall Street Journal and other publications) offers a throwback to earlier journalistic accounts of life in the Soviet Union. With the exception of some confusing chapters on political turmoil in the early '90s, this is a string of brief sketches of Soviet citizens who fought the totalitarian Soviet state during its final decades. Included among those whose largely tragic stories Satter recounts are striking miners, factory workers, collective- farm workers, unsuccessful border crossers, KGB targets, psychiatric prisoners, and Ukrainian activists. Particularly harrowing are the ``truth seekers,'' Soviet citizens who travel repeatedly to Moscow in search of justice from the central authorities. The chapter devoted to their stories is one of Satter's strongest; he devotes greater effort and space to developing the character of these wretched souls caught in a kafkaesque quest for truth. Despite many fascinating accounts of dissidents, both Satter's style and his stories suffer from the vehemence of his anti-Soviet polemic. The prose becomes flat and pedantic when he stops to lecture about the evils of Marxist- Leninist ideology, replacing the impressive and harrowing portraits of doomed individuals found elsewhere in the book with heavyhanded denunciations of a rotten Soviet regime that ``used force to create illusions'' after the predicted fairy-tale communism was not realized. Typical of Satter's tone are his final remarks about the ugly scene at a Soviet cafÇ: ``It is hard to avoid the impression that if labor created man out of an animal, it was the achievement of communism to have changed him back again.'' A passionate, often sanctimonious denunciation of the Soviet Union that dwells more on the past than the future.
Pub Date: June 4, 1996
ISBN: 0-394-52934-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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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