A fascinating grab bag of the author’s dogged research and personal interviews.
Shore (Intellectual History/Yale Univ.; Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, 2006, etc.) gathers reflections of her intellectual journeys through the deeply scarred, still-grieving lands of Eastern Europe from the mid-1990s to the present.
The author’s various academic studies and research projects brought her to Eastern Europe to study the tensions and contradictions among the intelligentsia of post-totalitarianism. Vaclav Havel called the years after 1968 a time of living “as if,” when no one really believed in communism any more, but it was enough to go through the motions “like a dog chained to his house who doesn’t want to upset his master.” Shore began in Prague, where she traced some of the signatories of the influential Charter 77, a collectively authored text defending human rights as put forth in the Helsinki Accords and which prompted numerous intellectuals in then-Czechoslovakia to be blacklisted for the next decade. She found, rather surprisingly, that many of the former signatories of the charter that had helped bring down the regime in 1989 were former Communist Party members who had hoped a new revolution would bring “socialism with a human face.” From Prague, where she took Czech language courses while teaching English, Shore visited Bucharest, where former dissidents of the Ceausescu regime made her aware of unsettling problems with the current democracy and ethnic discrimination. In Warsaw, the author scoured archives of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and remnants of postwar Jewry as it splintered into communist and Zionist sympathies before being snuffed out by Stalinism. Shore also explored records in Vilnius and Moscow and interviewed survivors and their descendants, offering numerous stories of heartbreak, betrayal and “the impossibility of closure.”
A fascinating grab bag of the author’s dogged research and personal interviews.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-88881-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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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