A methodical and painstaking—if highly opinionated—analysis of the figures, factions, and forces that contributed to the implosion of the Soviet Union. As the title suggests, Dunlop's focus is on the Gorbachev era's growing confrontation between the decentralizing, anti- imperial ``democrats,'' headed by Yeltsin, and the conservative, authoritarian, or proto-fascist ``statists'' aiming to preserve the USSR in its existing form at all costs—with Gorbachev himself shuttling uncertainly between the two camps. Publisher claims notwithstanding, this is anything but a ``sweeping narrative''—on the contrary, Dunlop's broad thesis—that glasnost unwittingly unleashed the twin tempests of democracy and nationalism that were to bring down the USSR—emerges from meticulous research, detailed almost too scrupulously. Dunlop stalls momentum by presenting each figure or tendency in turn and charting its trajectory from 1985 onward, rather than allowing it to emerge organically in a time- unified narrative. Only his account of the abortive coup of August 1991, whose unified action prohibits this fragmentary approach, swells into a compelling drama; here, Dunlop provides the most comprehensive and well-sourced version of those mysterious, tumultuous three days that most readers will have encountered. Elsewhere, he makes few concessions to the general audience, presuming a great deal of prior knowledge of the field. And many may bridle at his persistent and overt anti-Gorbachev, pro-Yeltsin bias: Time after time, Dunlop attributes the worst motives (dictatorial or at least Machiavellian) to Gorbachev, while awarding Yeltsin the benefit of any doubt. The author seems almost ready to attribute the Russian president's preservation during the 1991 putsch to divine intervention. Dunlop's contentiousness makes this a more likely spur to specialist debate than a generalist's definitive guide to the Soviet Union's demise.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-691-07875-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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 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
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