A revealing portrait of a city that has made and been made by an always difficult history.
A winning account of a city that “seems the loneliest of the world’s metropolises.”
Morrison, a professor of music and Slavic languages and literatures at Princeton University, has four decades’ worth of sojourns in Russia’s capital city. Although he cautions that there is no Russia as such, not without adjectives such as Imperial Russia or Soviet Russia—“That place doesn’t exist, except in the imagination, in a dreamscape of crime and punishment, war and peace, terror and utopia, Uncle Vanya and Doctor Zhivago”—there is certainly a Moscow, a place born long before “Russia” in a marshy lowland and now the locus of stagnation of a different sort, full of fine shops and rich people but “sealed off and duller than in the 1990s desperado days.” The original village was a place crouched behind wooden walls, terrorized by Mongol attacks that left it a smoking ruin with only a timber rampart to mark one phase of existence. Indeed, by Morrison’s account, Moscow has long been a place of smoke, with catastrophic fires periodically leveling the city throughout much of its premodern history; then, memorably, bombed mercilessly by German invaders three-quarters of a century ago; and long choked by industrial pollution. Its distance from everything, midway between two continents, kept it out of the hands of Napoleon and Hitler, but as much damage was done in Morrison’s flowing narrative by all manner of tyrants from “a small town ruled by brutes” to Ivan III to Stalin and down to Putin. The tyrants’ footprints remain; as Morrison writes, “The average tourist sees the past Stalin allowed preserved, and between the two, during the half century between 1950 and 2000, even what’s new under Putin still reflects his maximalist impulses.” Yet the city had and has its charms, such as its subway system—and, Morrison writes, its people, who continue to prove “the fact that it’s completely unfree but seems anarchically unbridled.”
A revealing portrait of a city that has made and been made by an always difficult history.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9780593318454
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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