Theodore White's you-are-there journalism makes its Soviet debut in this gripping account of the last years of the Soviet Union. Dobbs, Washington Post bureau chief in Moscow from 1988 to 1993, turns his own experiences as well as interviews with some of the major participants and the increasingly frank memoirs flooding out of Moscow to good account in reconstructing almost novelistic scenes from the decline. These include his own experience as the first US newsman allowed into the Gdansk shipyard and his presence on the scene when Yeltsin made his famous speech from a tank. He has a novelist's eye for telling detail: the table designed for negotiations in Warsaw ``providing a safety margin of three feet over and above the world's longest-recorded spitting distance''; the carpet to the Central Committee headquarters in Moscow as a guide to power, gliding past the offices of ordinary apparatchiks but making right-angle detours into the suites of top leaders; the supermarket in Houston that amazed and depressed Yeltsin—the Soviet group had scarcely recovered from the shock of the cheese section when they were ``literally shaken'' by the quality of produce in the vegetable section. ``They had to fool the people,'' Yeltsin told an aide, ``It is now clear why they made it so difficult for the average Soviet citizen to go abroad.'' Dobbs's epilogue is an excellent summation of Gorbachev's importance as ``the Communist who dismantled Communism, the reformer who is overtaken by his won reforms, the emperor who allows the world's last great multinational empire to break apart.'' The paradox is, he concludes, that by seeking to reinvigorate the Communist system, Gorbachev succeeded in destroying it. Dobbs succumbs to the temptation of using material derived from his time in Yugoslavia, which does not really fit into his overall theme, and his book is not as profound as David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb, but is well written and highly illuminating.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-43179-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
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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