An unfocused attempt to combine a biography of Tito, an account of Yugoslavia's rise and demise, and a weak argument about the centrality of religion to the region's conflict. British journalist West (A Hurricane in Nicaragua, 1990, etc.) frames his discussion of the breakup of Yugoslavia with a biography of Tito, ``the very personification of Yugoslavia.'' But his reader frequently loses sight of both Tito and current events amid a ramble through ancient Balkan history and an extended narrative of political events and personalities. The bulk of the book rests on secondary sources, especially biographies written by Tito's former comrades Milovan Djilas and Vladimir Dedijer. West's research is haphazard, though: Standard histories appear alongside obscure works, while other studies are bypassed. Instead of sustained argument, we are offered anecdotes and vignettes—Edward Gibbon on the battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389, Rebecca West on the town of Pritina in the 1930s, and Richard Burton, of all people, on Tito. The author is also given to making vapid generalizations. ``There was socialism but not much sociology in Yugoslavia,'' he writes, going on to assure readers that the country enjoys ``a good relationship between the sexes'' and is free of racism. (He obviously never spoke with any African students, gypsies, or Yugoslav women.) One of West's more interesting, if dubious, propositions is that Yugoslavia's dissolution has its roots in the religious rather than ethnic divisions among Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians. He offers the Irish/English split as a paradigm and makes much of the Catholic Church's activities in Croatia, giving far less attention to the Orthodox Church and the Muslims. But he never confronts competing theories of the present crisis, especially those arguing for the key role of manipulative politicians and of the media. Unsuccessful, both as original biography and as commentary on current events. (8 pages b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-7867-0191-9
Page Count: 436
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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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