A life—intriguing in every sense of the word—of legendary czarist police spy and social revolutionary Yevno Azef by Rubenstein (Conflict Resolution/George Mason Univ., Alchemists of Revolution, 1987). One of the most bizarre figures in the latter years of the czarist regime, Azef combined a hatred of czarism and a seemingly genuine aspiration for a more democratic Russia with a total amorality as to how he attained his objectives. Recruited by the Russian police in 1892, he became, with their help, one of the founders of the Social Revolutionary Party and then, unknown to them, the leader of the ``Fighting Organization'' dedicated to assassinating the most repressive czarist officials. To build up his credibility, he shamelessly betrayed dozens of party members, though chiefly those in factions to which he was opposed. In the course of his activities over 20 years, while reporting directly to the top intelligence officials in Russia, but without disclosing his ultimate objectives, he planned the successful assassinations of Interior Minister von Plehve and Grand Duke Sergei and, but for a stroke of fortune, might have killed the czar himself. Rubenstein theorizes that what was important for him was not so much the financial incentives but the power of ``deciding who on each side would live or die'' and, less convincingly, that only ``a man deeply wounded in his identity'' could have behaved in this way. Azef was brought down eventually by an investigative journalist and spent most of the last three years of his life in a German jail, much of it in solitary confinement, perceived as a threat to the German government. Though there is a little too much speculation and less than authoritative reconstruction of Azef's thoughts, this is a persuasive and gripping account of a shadowy but pivotal figure.
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-152895-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
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 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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