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KREMLIN WIVES

If this book proves anything, it is that the Russians have as much to learn about investigative journalism as they have about running an economy. Vasilieva, the daughter of a high-placed general and herself often in the Kremlin, researched this book in part by meeting with some of the Kremlin wives, including the widows of Brezhnev and Chernenko, and was allowed ``a few brief hours'' to examine KGB files. The extracts from the latter are both new and devastating, although they serve merely to confirm once again the total speciousness of the KGB charges against the wives of Kalinin and Molotov, respectively the president and the foreign minister of the Soviet Union under Stalin, which led to their imprisonment. The greatest value of the book lies in the mere fact of providing detail about women of whom little has been known: the freewheeling Alexandra Kollontai, an advocate of free love; the tragic Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin's second wife, who probably committed suicide, though Vasilieva deals usefully with the other scenarios that have been constructed about her death; Molotov's wife, Paulina Semyonovna, who with Molotov was Stalin's greatest friend, though it didn't prevent her spending five years in prison and in the camps; and many more obscure than these. But there is too much unattributed information, sheer speculation, and material that comes close to fantasy: Of Stalin's and Molotov's wives, she asks, without citing any evidence, ``Who could object if on occasion he [Stalin] sometimes slept with his wife's best friend and his best friend's wife?'' Or the statement that Lenin's letter to Stalin taking him to task for his harshness to Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, ``cost him his life.'' And finally she gives us what one might call the ``everyone in Dnepropetrovsk'' standard, as in ``Everyone in Dnepropetrovsk knew of his [Brezhnev's] affair.'' Some stunning stuff, but one often feels that one is dealing with the ghost of Elvis.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994

ISBN: 1-55970-260-5

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Arcade

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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