History at its best: readable, dramatic and propelled by unforgettable principals.
Desperate sailors take over the Russian Navy’s premier battleship, hoping to use their mutiny as a catalyst for revolution and the overthrow of Nicholas II.
Bascomb (Higher, 2003, etc.) presents the gripping events of June 1905 with sharply focused immediacy and a flair for high drama. The mutiny aboard the Potemkin, which threatened the entire Black Sea Fleet, was eventually suppressed, but it helped sow the seeds of the Russian Revolution. In Bascomb’s capable hands, this powerful morality play vividly reminds us never to underestimate a handful of people willing to die for an idea. The mutiny’s leaders were committed, desperate men with an equally desperate agenda—to put an end to the oppressive autocracy that had embroiled Russia in a destructive war with Japan and made life even more unbearable for the nation’s peasants. A lowly seaman named A.M. Matyushenko planned the daring takeover with another subversive sailor, G.N. Vakulenchuk. The mutiny was successful, but events quickly turned bloody. With the Potemkin anchored outside Odessa harbor, the Russian army massacred sympathetic workers lining the piers. When a squadron of ships arrived to sink the Potemkin, the crew of a second battleship also mutinied, prompting the Russian commander to flee. But the rebellion eventually stalled, failing to spark the land-based revolution its leaders had hoped for. Bascomb recounts the unfolding events in a believable and authoritative voice. He gives equal attention to the military officials determined to ruthlessly crush the revolt and to Nicholas, who had for years blindly ignored the growing unrest within his empire. Stunningly, the Potemkin mutiny seems to have only temporarily jarred the autocratic complacency of a myopic ruler largely out of touch with the world beyond his gilded palaces. It showed those hungry for revolution that there were thousands of others waiting to join their cause.
History at its best: readable, dramatic and propelled by unforgettable principals.Pub Date: May 22, 2007
ISBN: 0-618-59206-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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