A timely and penetrating history of the Balkans’ next crisis zone—the Serbian province of Kosovo. With its 90 percent ethnic Albanian population dominated by Serbs with a nasty record of human-rights abuses, Kosovo is a nightmare waiting to happen. Throughout the 20th century it has presented an intractable problem to Yugoslav leaders, both royalist and communist. Malcolm, a seasoned British journalist in the Balkans and the author of a much-acclaimed work on the region (Bosnia: A Short History, 1994), demonstrates a similar appreciation for the urgency and significance of both the present turmoil and the complicated past of the region. He manages to be both concise and comprehensive. The book begins with geographic and ethnographic background and follows historical developments chronologically from the medieval period to the present. Malcolm’s prose is lively and engaging, his scholarship well documented, and he seems unafraid of offending the warring camps, displaying a strong, healthy skepticism bred of many years spent in the Balkans. He identifies several major factors in the shaping of Kosovo’s past and present situation. The Serbian Orthodox Church’s use of religious rhetoric to defend “sacred” Serbian interests (the official Serbian Patriarchate and several historic churches) is, he asserts, “a classic example of religion being mobilized and manipulated for ideological purposes.” He also objects to the Serbs’ claims of political hegemony based “on the geography of long-gone kingdoms or empires.” He blames the politicization of Albanian-Orthodox relations since the 19th century for turning divisions into outright hostility, drawing a parallel to the key role of politicians in creating the Bosnian crisis. Significantly, Malcolm openly challenges both the legality of Kosovo’s incorporation into the Serbian state as well as a historiography of Kosovo that has misrepresented parts of the region’s history due to national and ideological biases. Both scholars and general readers will appreciate Malcolm’s vigorous and trenchant analysis of the region’s troubled past and present. This is destined to become a standard work on the subject.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8147-5598-4
Page Count: 460
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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