Sometimes too cursory (Harvey’s account of recent Afghan history, for example) but, overall, a trustworthy and well-reasoned...
Communism: a nice idea until it wasn’t.
Like nearly everyone else on the planet, former Economist editor and MP Harvey let the Cold War melt a little bit when Gorbachev came along. But he seems to have been no Burnhamite or neocon to begin with, and in opening this grand narrative of the 19th-century’s great secular religion, Harvey shows at least some sympathy for the communist project, which sets him apart from many other writers in our capital-happy time. Thus, while acknowledging that Marx wasn’t the nicest guy on the block, he allows that it wasn’t Marx’s fault that “the communist creed came to combine the ancient theories of despotism and the divine right of kings” when it landed on Third World soil; for that we have the murderous Lenin and Stalin to thank. To them, too, can be traced a point that Harvey handles very nicely: Far from being an internationalist and utopian creed, communism took on all sorts of local colorations and shibboleths, such that it’s perhaps better to speak of communisms in the plural. Harvey underscores this very point when, late in this sweeping narrative history, he moves away from the monolithic state systems of Russia and China to explore communism’s schismatics and pariahs: Fidelistas and Guevaristas, Red Guards and Khmer Rouge, Eurocommunists of various stripes who, in the 1970s, tried to give a human face to what increasingly seemed an inhuman ideology. Ironically, Harvey notes, the rise of rightist dictatorships in that decade—in places like Chile and the Dominican Republic—had the same result as the hardening of orthodox communism in the Soviet bloc would in the 1980s: as opposition grew, he writes, “the old bourgeois parties picked up support, not the extreme Left.”
Sometimes too cursory (Harvey’s account of recent Afghan history, for example) but, overall, a trustworthy and well-reasoned history of the god that failed.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32909-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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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