A historically exacting and compulsively readable portrait of the price of espionage.
Caccia and Mihovilović present a multigenerational chronicle of how a Croatian family’s progressive ideals led two brothers to become Soviet spies.
In 1880, Vilma Miskolczy was born in Osijek in northern Croatia, and as a child, she displayed intellectual energy and independence that led her to routine “defiance of prescriptions.” She rebelled against the “hypocritical attitudes of her immediate petit bourgeois surroundings” and against the conventions of the times, insisting on obtaining a university education at the age of 31 and pursuing her literary ambitions. Her worldview became increasingly shaped by socialist ideas, and her love of social justice was eventually imparted to her sons, Branko and Slavko. This dramatically engrossing and intellectually scrupulous history tells of how both brothers became deeply active in the Soviet intelligence sphere, working for the GRU, its principal agency. Branko posed as a journalist in Tokyo and was part of a spy ring that uncovered important information on Nazi Germany’s designs to go to war with the USSR. However, Soviet authorities treated both siblings poorly, despite their devotion and service. Slavko was imprisoned for harboring anti-Soviet positions—a ludicrous charge, according to the authors—and Branko was all but abandoned by his handlers when he was exposed as a spy and arrested by Japanese authorities in Tokyo. Caccia and Mihovilović furnish a remarkable portrait of one family’s commitment to justice and the grim price they paid for their idealism. Readers will find it difficult not to be impressed by their collective bravery, even if their ideological allegiances were intellectually suspect; Branko, in particular, was blindly loyal to Soviet ideals and seemed to believe, despite his general inclination toward philosophical skepticism, that “everything that came from Lenin’s homeland was bound to be unconditionally good.” The book’s presentation of minute details can be overwhelming at times, but it’s still an extraordinarily diligent study that offers an affecting look at the Soviet Union and its acolytes.
A historically exacting and compulsively readable portrait of the price of espionage.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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