A gripping narrative of the revolutions that swept Central and Eastern Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the extraordinary events in China and South Africa in 1989-90. BBC reporter Simpson (Inside Iran, 1988, etc.) seamlessly joins telling detail and lucid analysis to capture the pathos and politics of modern revolution. Before 1989, he writes, going behind the Iron Curtain was like stepping through the looking glass. Governments supposedly erected in the name of the people controlled, repressed, and abused the people and were always backed by the threat of Soviet force. Enter Mikhail Gorbachev talking perestroika and glasnost, and ``the Communist leadership of each of these countries was effectively left on its own. And since none of them was there by popular will, it was only a matter of time and chance how they collapsed....'' By comparing previous visits to these repressive states, Simpson vividly describes how conditions became ripe for change in the Eastern bloc countries and elsewhere. When the Soviets cut back aid to the African National Congress in 1988, the US could no longer claim to be supporting the government against Communist insurgents. When Gorbachev visited Beijing after Hu Yaobang's death, the rebellious students were spurred on to a showdown in Tiananmen Square. Ninety b&w photographs and twelve maps help illustrate what Simpson saw. Coupled with the text, the result is first-rate journalism, with the reporter as reflection of, and eyewitness to, history.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-09-174582-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hutchinson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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