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ECHOES OF A NATIVE LAND

TWO CENTURIES OF A RUSSIAN VILLAGE

Russia's chaotic but captivating past and present come together in this perceptive narrative of one family's estate and the village life surrounding it. Inspired by his grandfather's descriptions of its natural beauty and the agreeable life there, Schmemann, a Pulitzer Prizewinning New York Times correspondent, visited the ruins of Sergiyevskoye (the village is now called Koltsovo), the site of his ancestral estate 90 miles south of Moscow. At first he wanted only ``to catch the echoes of a native land.'' But the journalist's connection with Koltsovo deepened as he came to regard the village as his unique window onto Russian life through the centuries. Schmemann relates the estate's history from its origins in the late 18th century through its purchase by one of his ancestors, a member of the Osorgin family, during a game of cards. Tales of daily life at the estate are mingled with an ongoing narrative of Russian history, customs, village life, political trends, and family lore. Readers come to know individual members of the Osorgin family as well as the current generation of Koltsovo villagers, who make a particularly striking impression. From this rich mÇlange the reader takes away two central themes: the Osorgin family's deep and lasting religious faith and the tenacity of the Russian peasant. Schmemann movingly recreates the harmonious and spiritual life that characterized the Osorgin family and the inspiration they drew from the beautiful natural setting of their estate on the Oka River. Peasant life, on the other hand, was predictable only in its suffering and endurance: ``These people had survived serfdom, reform, revolution, and war; they had known despotic and benign barons.'' And yet they are still there, doing their best to survive under the current regime. Schmemann succeeds where others haven't by refusing to idealize the past and by bringing to his subject an empathy that, perhaps, is his own claim to the Osorgins' spiritual heritage. (62 illustrations, 2 maps, not seen)

Pub Date: Oct. 24, 1997

ISBN: 0-679-43810-6

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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