A detailed study aimed at military analysts and scholars rather than the general reading public. The authors (Knezys is a former military advisor to Lithuania’s president; Sedlickas is a former US Air Force major) provide only a cursory introduction to the historical background of the Chechens’ fight for independence, while the bulk of the book describes in minute detail the events of the war itself. The dry prose and clinical-sounding text is accompanied by numerous maps that provide readers with a general geographic orientation and with carefully prepared plans of battle sites. But Knezys and Sedlickas also move beyond microanalysis of the battlefield, offering opinions on broader political questions raised by the war in Chechnya. To begin with, both authors are of Lithuanian background and use Lithuania and the plight of such newly independent countries as a point of comparison with Chechnya. Asking whether Lithuanians would respond to Russian aggression as did the Chechens, the authors respond positively; they then use the example to support their theory that future wars of independence by small countries will feature military terrorism against larger aggressors. Indeed, the authors’ claims for the legitimacy and efficacy of military terrorism lies at the center of their analysis. Knezys and Sedlickas are critical of the West’s view of Russia and what they perceive as the West’s insensitivity to independence struggles in the former Soviet Union. In short, they assert that the West ought to “delve into the harsher realities” of Russian colonialism and question its own recognition of some massive atrocities (i.e., Kosovo) but not others. Finally, the authors deliberately evaluate the role and personality of Chechen leader Dzhochar Dudajev in a more favorable light than have many, stressing self-sacrifice for the national good over the oft-cited accusations of criminal activity of Dudajev and the “Chechen mafia.” Provides a thorough analysis and offers thoughtful and potentially controversial insights into how the West has responded to the fight for Chechen independence.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1999
ISBN: 0-89096-856-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Texas A&M Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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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