A plodding account of the Story of the Century, told by journalist and Russian scholar Felshman with all the verve and wit of a back issue of Pravda. The recent convulsions in Soviet history have produced an overwhelming curiosity about the leaders of Russia's ``second revolution,'' and Felshman sets out to add a bit of flesh to the skeletal biographies of Gorbachev and Yeltsin that most Westerners have had to make do with up to now. High Soviet authorities have traditionally kept themselves far from the limelight, revealing so little about their private lives that most independent newspapers have been hard-pressed to file even a standard obituary for many of them (Chernenko, for example, was not known with any certainty to have been married until his wife appeared at his funeral). Unfortunately, perestroika has had little impact on this convention, and most of what Felshman digs up (mainly from secondary sources) doesn't take us very far: the details of education and career, as well as the careful record of Party posts and honors, can't explain two figures as radical (or as radically different) as Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Both began as typical Party apparatchiks, both achieved prominence after long decades of dogged climbing, and both eventually came to the conclusion that something serious had to give way if the Soviet Union was to survive. Felshman makes it clear that Yeltsin is the greater maverick of the two, but this was widely apparent long ago, and it might have been wiser to have devoted more attention to him—Yeltsin is allotted only one chapter out of ten here—since he is the more obscure and (for now) far more interesting of the pair. The sections dealing with Raisa Gorbachev are gossipy and shallow. No great shakes, even for glasnost groupies. (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-08200-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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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