Close-to-the-bone reporting that led the Kremlin to designate the author as a hostile journalist.
From the Globe and Mail’s former Moscow bureau chief, a vivid, fact-crammed report on how the Kremlin’s efforts to rein in the 14 former Soviet republics has led to Cold War–like conflict with the United States.
Chief players in the ongoing drama are former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, Russia’s enormously popular president since 2000, who is bent on restoring the former Soviet empire; American philanthropist George Soros, whose money and “Open Society” approach have aided democratic forces in Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus and other formerly communist nations; and the U.S., which applauds Putin’s help in its “War on Terror” even as it fosters anti-Putin unrest in the republics to keep Caspian Sea oil and gas flowing to the West. Bringing us into street protests and government machinations in Moscow, Kiev and elsewhere, MacKinnon details the headline-making revolts that removed the despotic Milosevic, Shevardnadze and Kuchma, bringing U.S.-friendly leaders and a new freedom to Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine respectively. Putin has imposed his quasi-authoritarian, managed democracy by using Russia’s immense natural gas and other resources to control the ex-Soviet republics, writes the author. At the same time, the Russian president deals ruthlessly with Chechen terrorists and with Russian “oligarchs” whose new-made fortunes under privatization sometimes breed dissidence. (For example, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s wealthiest man, was convicted of fraud and sent to a Siberian prison camp in 2005.) Putin’s popularity rests on having restored stability to the former Soviet bloc after the chaotic freedom of the 1990s. For the U.S., his years in power have had mixed outcomes: Russia is “more hostile” to the West than at any time since 1991, declares MacKinnon, but a growing string of friendly neighboring regimes now protects U.S. energy interests and provides investment markets.
Close-to-the-bone reporting that led the Kremlin to designate the author as a hostile journalist.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-78672-083-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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