An excellent complement to recent work by other Russian journalists who have turned to history, and to brilliant purpose.
A vivid, character-driven reconstruction of the period leading up to the overthrow of the Romanovs and the birth of modern Russia.
One-time TV host Zygar (All the Kremlin's Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin, 2016) opens with a mild protest: he is a journalist and not a historian and so writes by the journalist’s playbook, “as if the characters were alive and I had been able to interview them.” Nonetheless, the author commands a powerful depth of historical knowledge and a novelist’s knack for sorting through the details to determine what is important and what’s ancillary. His book is long on meaningful storytelling in the service of finding out what went wrong in Russia’s brief moment of liberalism, an era that snapped shut a century ago. He adds that his characters, who range from rebels to royals, intellectuals to clerics, had no idea how their deeds would play out in history or how small events would turn into big ones. In some senses, the October Revolution began more than two years earlier, with anti-German riots that embraced the Empress Alexandra, “an ethnic German by birth.” The riots did not please Alexandra, still less the demands of the crowd that her confessor, Rasputin, be hanged, and still less the popularity of the general who restored order. In a narrative reminiscent of the best of Eduardo Galeano, Zygar raises all sorts of what-if questions in the reader’s mind: what if Alexander Kerensky had prevailed over Lenin? What if the old intelligentsia, civil service, and minor nobility had been able to integrate into Soviet society instead of being massacred by Stalin? What if the czarist state had been able to read the tea leaves better and accommodated the demands of the people for better food, better jobs, better government? The possibilities are endless—and endlessly fascinating.
An excellent complement to recent work by other Russian journalists who have turned to history, and to brilliant purpose.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61039-831-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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