This harrowing and engrossing account of the chaos of Russia in the '90s leaves the reader as stunned as the Russians currently struggling for their very survival. Reports about life in postSoviet Russia saturate the media, leading the American audience to think it may have heard all there is to know. But seasoned journalist Randolph offers a model of reliable journalism and inspired prose, a fortunate alliance that lends freshness to some familiar subjects: Russia's new entrepreneurs and mafia; its traditional and alternative health care; the efforts of its artists, its women, and its youth to find some better way of life. Randolph, who reported from Russia for the Washington Post from 1991 to 1993, describes her time there as ``like watching an explosion in slow motion.'' Life is wild, unpredictable, violent, the police inept or invisible, crime of all kinds flourishing, the government at a standstill. Most Russians have little choice but to live in some ways outside the law. The name of the game is survival; the word appears repeatedly in Randolph's profiles, bringing cohesion and analytical depth to her portraits of farmers and would-be entrepreneurs, ballerinas and hustlers, gay activists and faith healers, making vividly comprehensible the uncertainty, danger, and excitement felt by Russians compelled to live on the frontier of capitalism. Her depiction of how various Russians cope with their uncertainties gains vigor from the extended interviews she conducted during her stay in Moscow and on follow-up visits. The dynamic and complex picture that results is bolstered by Randolph's witty style, which allows readers to share some of the shocks inflicted by her encounters—as with the bioenergy pathologist who massaged her head for sinus trouble, his hands grease-blackened from fixing his car. It is Randolph's game willingness to enter into the wild world of the new Russia that keeps the reader turning the pages. Ordinary life, in Randolph's hands, is truly extraordinary.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80912-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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 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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