A latecomer to the field, not strong enough to displace better books that cover the same ground, such as Marq de Villiers’...
Prosaic travels through the rubble of the Soviet Empire.
Former NPR Moscow bureau chief Sheets has been a longtime resident of Russia, having arrived there as a student in the late 1980s and been privileged to see firsthand the reforms of the Gorbachev era and, soon thereafter, the collapse of the Soviet Union. As he writes here, not everyone in Russia or its former satellites was glad to see the Soviets go. One old survivor of the siege of Leningrad, for instance, faults current leader Vladimir Putin, a former KGB stalwart, for not being tough enough, even if he “had made Russia respected in the world again—if not an empire, then certainly a country to be taken seriously.” Sheets travels through several post-Soviet landscapes, observing the war Chechnya as it was unfolding; he adds value to other accounts by being able to speak directly to the combatants in conversations that highlight, among other things, racism in the ranks. There are some revealing moments, as when former statesman Edvard Shevardnadze admits that he had not correctly foreseen the events that would sweep the Soviet state from power (“I was convinced the Soviet Union would disintegrate,” he says. “But to be honest, I was off by 10 or 15 years”), and when Sheets travels into the “Stans,” which he calls “some of the most quirky countries of earth.” The author’s accounts are evenhanded and trustworthy, but his prose limps along, pausing to remark on too man obvious points. Less of the expected nostrums and more on the gritty business of collecting news in dangerous places would have helped.
A latecomer to the field, not strong enough to displace better books that cover the same ground, such as Marq de Villiers’ Down the Volga (1992), Thomas Goltz’s Chechnya Diary (2003) and Andrew Jack’s Inside Putin’s Russia (2004).Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-39582-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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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