Authoritative, cogent, and compelling account of the upheavals in Eastern Europe. Stokes (History/Rice; Politics as Development, 1990, etc.—not reviewed) blends meticulous research and narrative drive, covering Communism's weary decline after 1968 with an epic sweep that takes in not only such expected landmarks as the Prague Spring, the birth of Solidarity, and the entrance of Mikhail Gorbachev, but also myriad telltale incidents of tension and dissension from Budapest to Bucharest. The author renders a full and damning account of Communism's economic failure, but he steers clear of economic determinism, treating economic collapse as a necessary but insufficient cause for the political earthquake. Ideology is the real battleground here, its heroes the leading figures of the late 70's dissident movements—both celebrated figures like Havel, Walesa, and Adam Michnik, and less familiar ones like the Bulgarian poet Blaga Dimitrova. These humanist ``antipoliticians'' confronted their oppressors' moral and political bankruptcy with their own efforts to ``live in truth'' (Havel's term)—to recover the cultural integrity of their countries in the creation of a parallel civil society that, when the moment came, was ready to accept the mantle of legitimacy. Stokes recounts these dissident struggles with obvious admiration, yet always objectively, and with an eye for the telling detail or the grimly humorous—such as abandoned Trabant automobiles ``spring[ing] up each morning like mushrooms'' in summer 1989 on Eastern European streets, discarded by their asylum-seeking East German owners. The author discerns a grand historical narrative, too—the eventual victory of enlightened democratic pluralism in a three-cornered ideological contest with ``antirationalism'' (fascism) and ``hyperrationalism'' (Stalinism). But there's no trite cold war triumphalism here—a bleak and cautionary last chapter describing Yugoslavia's plummet into bloody civil war is a reminder that, throughout Europe, the lifting of Communism has also unleashed atavistic nationalist passions that could yet imperil freedom. With magisterial command, Stokes does full justice to his momentous subject.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-19-506644-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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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