An unconvincing effort, of interest to those who’ve seen Anastasia walking alongside Elvis on the streets of Paris.
Did the last Romanov tsar and tsarina and their royal brood fall to Bolshevik bullets? History books say yes. This drab tale says no—or, well, maybe not.
It is incontrovertibly true that Red soldiers held the tsar and his family prisoner in a provincial town in the Urals, admits historical researcher and political consultant McNeal. It is also true that various military elements, including White Russian anti-Bolsheviks and Czech, British, and even American expeditionary forces, had it in mind to liberate the royals while purging Siberia of Communists. The standard histories say that the Bolsheviks, made nervous by the advance of these counter-revolutionary forces, executed the royals and dumped their remains in the forest outside Ekaterinburg, where, in 1979, a crew of Soviet archaeologists turned up bones later identified as those of the tsar, his wife, their sons and daughters, and even the family dog. McNeal disputes the validity of the archaeologists’ findings and subsequent DNA tests. Instead, among other richly speculative scenarios, she posits that agents of the British and American governments, working through members of the Russian Orthodox clergy and representatives of the Leninist government, managed to free the tsar and spirit him and his family off to internal exile, leaving it to the Bolsheviks to put out the cover story that the family had been executed—and allowing them the possibility of producing the royal family should there have been a massive public outcry against the supposed murder. Among the evidence McNeal produces is this tidbit: “The Marchioness of Milford Haven, one of the Tsarina’s sisters, wrote that the Dowager Empress had told her that the family was hidden in the far north of Russia, which could only be reached in summer.” The other bits and pieces of evidence are about as definitive, none of them the necessary smoking gun.
An unconvincing effort, of interest to those who’ve seen Anastasia walking alongside Elvis on the streets of Paris.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-688-16998-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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