A cold-eyed examination of recent Russian history that seems to show that there was never a solid plan to integrate Russia...
A systematic account of Russia’s emergence from the wreckage of the Soviet Union with a renewed sense of authoritarian mission.
There isn’t really anybody to blame for “losing” Russia except for “its own creators.” In this painstaking account, Sunday Times foreign editor Conradi (The Great Survivors: How Monarchy Made It into the Twenty-First Century, 2012, etc.) meticulously lays out the record, from Mikhail Gorbachev to Vladimir Putin. The author emphasizes that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russians were more preoccupied with their own economic viability than with political woes—a fair assessment considering the sudden collapse of price controls in the early 1990s and rise of hyperinflation. As privatization was carried out painfully in Russia under Boris Yeltsin, the West did not lend its aid in a gushing “new Marshall Plan.” The minority countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain moved for independence, prompting military action in 1994 against Chechnya and a conflicted reaction by the Russian people and consternation by the Bill Clinton administration. The enlargement of NATO delighted the U.S. but alarmed the Russians, while the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and loss of Ukraine compounded Russia’s isolation. Conradi notes that all Russia needed, at the end of Yeltsin’s regime, was “a figure able to harness this sense of grievance and thirst for revenge,” and Yeltsin handpicked his successor in former KGB officer Putin in late 1999. After assuming power, Putin gradually slid into old Soviet-style authoritarianism—e.g., the arrest and Siberian exile of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of the oil giant Yukos; the Russian storming of the school taken hostage in Beslan, North Ossetia, in September 2004; and the resistance to the detaching of Ukraine from Russia’s orbit and invasion of Crimea in 2014, among other developments. Despite the “reset” button pushed by President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Putin has continued to show a desire to re-create the lost Soviet empire.
A cold-eyed examination of recent Russian history that seems to show that there was never a solid plan to integrate Russia into the West.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78607-041-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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