An illuminating, interpretive report on Mikhail Gorbachev's exercise of power, which concludes that his reforms may do more to expose than remedy the deficiencies of the Soviet Union's sociopolitical and economic institutions. Kaiser (co-author, Russia from the Inside, 1980, etc.) grapples with an intriguing paradox throughout his highly personal text. In brief, he seeks to explain how a lifelong Communist and upwardly mobile Party official could evolve from a modest progressive into a revolutionary chieftain who unleashed forces he seems unable to control. Unlike Gail Sheehy in The Man Who Changed the World (1990), Kaiser accords Gorbachev's provincial youth and early manhood comparatively short shrift, focusing mainly on his subject's dramatic career after he had climbed the Kremlin's slippery pole early in 1985. Among the more important reasons for Gorbachev's ascent, Kaiser believes, was the old guard's realization that the Soviet system had failed, making radical change from an apparatchik acceptable, even alluring. At the top, though, Gorbachev showed himself a leader with a sense of direction and a tactician's opportunism, albeit with no detailed plans for achieving his goals—a lack with far-reaching consequences. By Kaiser's account, for instance, the first summit with Reagan made Gorbachev a hostage to his own good behavior, i.e., by precluding any possibility of a crackdown inside the USSR's crumbling empire. As one result, Eastern European satellites gained their freedom, setting an example the Baltic republics are trying to follow. Their challenge to authority has precipitated an abrupt reversal of the Politburo's brief fling with democratic ideals—at no small cost to Gorbachev's global prestige. While his fate and that of the aspirations he encouraged remain very open questions, Kaiser notes that Gorbachev never eliminated the governance mechanisms that make dictatorship possible. A savvy, closely reasoned appraisal of an embattled kingpin who has been overtaken by events he initiated.
Pub Date: May 17, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-73692-2
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
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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