Provocative, and sure to inspire learned discussion, if not controversy.
A searching intellectual history of modern Russia, “a culture without reason.”
Russia a land without reason? The idea was endorsed by none other than Isaiah Berlin, one of Russia’s great minds and a confidant of the author’s. Chamberlain (Lenin’s Private War, August 2007, etc.) persuasively argues that while other nations, beginning in the 19th century, developed rich philosophical traditions devoted to liberal education and the cultivation of personal freedom, the Russian intelligentsia “realized that their first priority in spreading enlightenment in Russia must be to oust the autocracy.” Speculative philosophy, aesthetics and other such things had their place in Russian scholarship, but they were valued less than politics, social structure and political change; because Russia was not connected to Western Catholicism, classical antiquity and the Renaissance had passed it by, leaving medieval Orthodoxy to fill the gap. Followers of sometime Orthodox, sometime Marxist philosophers such as Nikolai Lossky, Sergei Bulgakov and Nikolai Berdyaev might object that they were at once modern, political, conservative and devout, not so removed from Rousseau and Kant; cynics might even suggest that the whole Communist era was the product of too much philosophy, and not enough of it. Still, Chamberlain ably and lucidly follows her fruitful line of thought, working in notes on the individuality-mistrusting Dostoyevsky, who urged piety and obedience after one too many nights in the tsar’s jails; V. I. Lenin, who saw to it that a brand of totalitarianism flourished to make of Russia a “unique, non-Western, community”; and Alexandre Koyré, who posited that it was precisely because Cartesian rationalism had never taken root in Russia that such monstrous assaults on truth as Lysenkoism could have occurred. And as for today? Writes Chamberlain, the struggle between positive and negative liberty endures, existing “on the edge of a Western culture where we too no longer live in the centre.”
Provocative, and sure to inspire learned discussion, if not controversy.Pub Date: July 9, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58567-952-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Rookery/Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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