If much of what passes for foreign policy analysis is instant-formula baby food, this is the real thing and approaches developments in Russia over the past decade with refreshing if brutal candor. Simes, himself a Russian exile, was an advisor to Richard Nixon and arranged his last trips to Russia. It is a “profound misreading,” Simes contends, to think that the relationship with Russia will continue to be an “easy ride” for the US. Yeltsin’s reelection was not a “triumph of democracy,” and the Clinton administration does a significant disservice to the relationship and to its influence on Russia to pretend that it was. Indeed, Yeltsin has created a system in which “Al Capone would be more at home than Thomas Jefferson,” an oligarchy run by corrupt officials and industrialists which has alienated the people and done a rotten job of running the country. The bleakness of these views makes Simes’s own “cautious optimism” that much more surprising and perhaps persuasive. Despite an economic catastrophe in Russia more severe than the Great Depression in the US, he sees hope in the sheer extent of Russia’s resources, its well-trained labor force, its new entrepreneurial spirit, and the reluctance of the majority to contemplate a return to Soviet-style socialism. Which is not necessarily that good for the US: Simes believes that it is inevitable that Russia will increasingly direct its own path in foreign policy, particularly as it resolves its current economic difficulties, though for the time being it will be constrained by the need to retain Western support for its economy. He believes that the US, for its part, will need to show more understanding, more restraint, and less capriciousness in its foreign policy—which may be the one point at which the realism of the analysis becomes suspect. A bracing cold shower of a book, but all the more refreshing for it. (maps, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-82716-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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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