A compelling portrait of the Chechen people and the effects of war on innocent victims, demonstrating the depths to which...
Graphic, often horrifying memoir by a Chechen doctor who treated Russian soldiers, Chechen rebels, and civilians caught in the middle.
Now living in the US and struggling with English, Baiev is assisted here by former U.S. News & World Report Moscow bureau chief Nicholas Daniloff (Two Lives—One Russia, 1988, etc.) and freelance journalist Ruth Daniloff. Drawing on his wartime journal to depict the bitter conflict, the doctor also recalls his Muslim childhood amid an extended family, his medical studies in Moscow, and his early years as a prosperous cosmetic surgeon in Russia. With war imminent, he returned to Chechnya in 1994 and was soon practicing emergency medicine under rapidly deteriorating and extremely dangerous conditions, first in Grozny, the capital, and then in his hometown, Alkhan Kala. Operating without electricity, gas, or running water, under attack from Russian missiles, eventually forced to use sour milk and honey on wounds, to suture with ordinary thread, and to amputate limbs using only local anesthetics and carpentry saws, Baiev was at times the only doctor for some hundred thousand people. Both Russian forces and Chechen rebels threatened to kill him for treating those on the other side, and his escapes were harrowingly narrow. During an uneasy peace in the late 1990s, suffering clinical depression and contemplating suicide, Baiev made a life-changing, soul-saving pilgrimage to Mecca. By the summer of 1999 he was again in Chechnya, stockpiling food and medical supplies in preparation for the resumption of war. This time he videotaped conditions for Western news organizations. After the nephew who helped him was executed, Baiev decided in early 2000 to take the offer of a Russian security services officer to help him leave Chechnya. Members of Physicians for Human Rights and the Human Rights Watch helped him find sanctuary in the US.
A compelling portrait of the Chechen people and the effects of war on innocent victims, demonstrating the depths to which human beings can sink and the heights to which they can rise.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8027-1404-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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