by Jennifer Gould ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 26, 1997
A journalistic Perils of Pauline in what the author breezily terms the ``FSU'' (Former Soviet Union). After a year spent working for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Gould, a young Canadian journalist, decided (for reasons that are never made clear) to seek work in the FSU. She doesn't speak Russian and she knows no Russians, but she nevertheless overcomes all the obstacles. She hangs out with 15-year-old hoodlums, Mafia bosses, and YILGs (Young Ivy League Gangsters); she is hijacked, visits the scene of strife in Georgia and the front in Chechnya; and she interviews Vladimir Zhirinovsky on a trip down the Volga. Most chapters are preceded by a pretentious and often not very relevant quotation from Marcuse or some other intellectual luminary, but the book's political heft can be judged by her considered view that ``in practice, Russian Communism may have turned out to be a totalitarian tool for continued state-sanctioned oppression, imperialism and anti-Semitism, but in theory it wasn't so bad. There is a lot of good to found in reading Lenin.'' This may be why she was given the nickname (which delighted her) of Lenin's Ghost. As her experience of the FSU deepens, the quality of her reportage improves, and her assessments of the situation in Chechnya and Georgia, while not very profound, are vivid. So is her portrait of Zhirinovsky, whose emptiness, recklessness, and obsession with sex—he tried in the course of a taped interview with her, representing Playboy, to persuade her and her translator to engage in group sex with two of his bodyguards, in front of him- -come through clearly. A wild and woolly picture, indeed, but the main tension in Gould's gaudy, melodramatic narrative derives from the uncertainty as to whether or not she will suffer an FWTD (Fate Worse Than Death). (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 26, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15241-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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