Fortunately for the publishers of Shevardnadze's quickie account of his years as the USSR's foreign minister, the author remained on the side of the angels during the recent, botched coup. Unfortunately for most readers, his selective and largely self- serving tract raises appreciably more questions than it answers. Shevardnadze (now 61) accords notably short shrift to his boyhood and subsequent career as a Communist Party official in Georgia, an omission that will leave many to wonder how he climbed the slippery pole of a provincial bureaucracy and what forces might have given him the will to pursue democratic, even populist, ideals. Nor, save for the brief assurance that he and Gorbachev became fast friends as young apparatchiks, does the author have much to say about his early relationship with the embattled Soviet President. In disjointedly recounting his role in resolving the Afghan conflict, the USSR's withdrawal from Eastern Europe, the Chernobyl disaster, and other epic events, Shevardnadze is scarcely more informative. At times, in fact, he's irritatingly coy. For example, he leaves to ``future textbooks on diplomacy'' the details of the compromise that enabled him and Deng Xiaoping to reach the agreement that normalized the Soviet Union's relations with mainland China. And with more piety than wit, he offers a wealth of rhetoric attesting to his abiding respect for human rights, the environment, economic opportunity, artistic expression, peace, international amity, and other politically correct values. The book's epilogue, though, written just in the past few days, offers an exciting eyewitness account of the coup and Shevardnadze's role in resisting it—and seems to put to rest his friendship with Gorbachev, whom he accuses of ``spoon-feeding the junta with...his poor judgment of people, his indifference towards his true allies, his distrust of democratic forces....'' On the evidence of the disappointingly exiguous memoir at hand, Shevardnadze would have been well advised to let his dramatic year-end 1990 resignation speech, in which he explicitly warned against the threat of dictatorship, continue to speak for itself.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1991
ISBN: 0-02-928617-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1991
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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