A nuanced look at deep complications underneath stories of asylum seekers in their journey “from tyranny to liberty.”
A densely researched examination of the defector program constructed in the West as a response to Soviet restriction of movement during the Cold War.
The harboring of defectors from the Soviet Union in their “leap to freedom” was a tremendous coup for the West. However, as historian and Russian Review editor Scott shows in this multilayered academic study, it was also a delicate balancing act between the two Cold War powers. The right to seek asylum was affirmed in the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and refugee protections were later detailed in the 1951 Geneva Convention. Although originally designated as those who fled from the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, political defectors came to encompass migrants from China, Vietnam, Cuba, and elsewhere in the socialist world. The backgrounds of the defectors were diverse—from artist to sailor to politician to embassy administrator—and their cases often uneasily straddled the “political and ideological fault lines of the Cold War.” In the U.S., the National Security Council created a defector program by the early 1950s, with the aim of selecting Soviet defectors who could be helpful in relaying intelligence information and whose stories of flight would aid the Cold War narrative of West versus East. However, not all defectors were welcome, nor did they have an easy time adjusting, and many even returned to the Soviet Union. Scott looks at many cases that were more complicated than that of Victor Kravchenko, “the Soviet official who fled while on assignment in Washington [and] published I Chose Freedom in 1946, just as the battle lines between the Cold War’s superpowers were being drawn.” Scott makes a strong argument that limiting border movement became an integral part of “globalization’s architecture” and that “defectors were both the catalysts for the delimiting of previously open spaces and the most visible representatives of the consequences of enclosure.”
A nuanced look at deep complications underneath stories of asylum seekers in their journey “from tyranny to liberty.”Pub Date: July 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780197546871
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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