Valuable insight into developments in the Soviet Union since the death of Stalin, by a former Moscow correspondent for the Associated Press, Newsweek, and US News and World Report (for which he now serves as Paris bureau chief). Coleman uses his stints in Moscow to good effect, not only to flesh out what we know about dramatic events like Khrushchev's fall in 1964, Brezhnev's decision to invade Afghanistan in 1979, and Gorbachev's reform plans of 1985, but also to provide the telling anecdote and illustration. Thus, he notes that in 1953, at a time when Soviet rocketry was widely feared in the West, a scientific worker was obliged to climb a ladder propped against a rocket to measure the fuel level inside. While sympathetic to the difficulties involved, Coleman believes that the US consistently overestimated Soviet power and was less than skillful in understanding the Soviet system. He notes that the US was always surprised when the second secretary to the party committee emerged as the next leader, and when that leader changed the policies of his predecessor and attempted to discredit him, although it happened every time. And he gives evidence, not always totally persuasive, that this is not wisdom after the event. Perhaps the author's most interesting contribution is his reassessment of Gorbachev, whose reputation has flamed out in recent years. Coleman argues that he ``accomplished more than any other statesman in the world during the last half of the twentieth century.'' Coleman's feel for Boris Yeltsin seems more tentative, and some of Coleman's certainty deserts him in his attempt to descry the future, though he believes the reform era is drawing to a close, ``either by the election of a communist, an extreme nationalist, a militarist, or a more authoritarian Yeltsin.'' An important contribution to our understanding of the last 40 years in Russia, even if one can't avoid the thought that it was never quite so clear at the time. (16 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14312-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: St. Martin's
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
