Dry, but useful for the foreign-policy crowd.
Russia, writes German academic Stuermer (History/Univ. of Erlangen-Nurnberg), is weak—but nowhere near as weak as it looks.
Many things keep Russia from regaining its superpower status. One, by the author’s account, is that the government of Vladimir Putin and his successor, Dmitri Medvedev, peg much of the planned part of its economy—including the government’s budget—on the projected price of oil. Though Russia is a major producer, when plans are made based on a price per barrel of $71 and that price goes down to $40 on the world market, trouble is bound to ensue. In the flush days, Putin kept something of the old Soviet bargain: “The people accepted an increasingly autocratic regime while the Kremlin delivered rising living standards—as never before.” Now that oil prices have fallen so precipitously, the rise is reversed, and the Russian GDP is projected to shrink by six percent or more. For good or ill, depending on where you’re sitting, the Russians don’t seem to know that they’re weak, however, which complicates the geopolitical scene. There is a certain surrealism in an economy that is at once closed and open, just as modern Russia seems to abound in strange ironies—not least a billboard of famed dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn welcoming visitors outside the Moscow airport. Stuermer’s searching view of Putin’s government, which stretches into the Medvedev administration, has some points of immediate interest. Foremost among them is his view that the West should not rule out all hopes for democracy in Russia, despite Putin’s autocratic ways. Even if the near term holds the likelihood of “an enlightened authoritarianism, free of contradictions and in control of its own destiny,” Medvedev has ambitions to “go down in history as a great reformer.” The best move for the West is therefore to continue to seek shared interests—and keep the peace.
Dry, but useful for the foreign-policy crowd.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-062-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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