An interesting glimpse into a hitherto obscure Soviet spy ring, but there is less there than meets the eye.
History-changing it wasn’t, but this is a genuinely untold story about a major Soviet espionage operation.
In a well-researched and often breathless account, Lokhova (By-Fellow/Churchill Coll., Univ. of Cambridge) focuses on Soviet technocrat Stanislav Shumovsky (1902-1984), who led an advanced party of 75 countrymen to the United States in 1931 to enroll in universities, majoring in science or engineering. The students’ goal, Stalin informed them, was to bring home knowledge from the world’s most advanced nation to jump-start sluggish Soviet industry. They were to learn, but even more, they were to steal. Overseen by Shumovsky and a cadre of undercover agents, they sent back an avalanche of technical information under the nose of the FBI, which remained oblivious for two decades. “To an extent that has never been acknowledged before,” writes the author, “the Soviet Union’s survival during the Second World War was underpinned by the technological and manufacturing secrets, plundered from US universities and factories, that enabled the development and mass manufacture of the aircraft and tanks needed to defeat the Third Reich.” Lokhova is at her best describing individuals: earnest Russians and often enthusiastic Americans who were happy to help build the workers’ paradise led by Stalin, who receives an admiring portrait. While there’s no doubt the Soviet Union received useful intelligence, readers will not find hard evidence that this ensured its survival. Obsessed with espionage, the Soviets expended enormous resources perhaps better spent elsewhere. Much of the massive material sent back was public or simply proprietary. Lokhova highlights American amazement at the advanced Soviet Tupolev Tu-4 bomber, but it owed more to reverse-engineering of the American B-29 than spying. American material, not secrets, aided the Soviet Union against Hitler. Acquiring the American atom bomb plans saved time and money, but it was not a game-changer. Concentrating on the trees at the expense of the forest, the author never points out that Soviet industry remained backward until its 1989 collapse.
An interesting glimpse into a hitherto obscure Soviet spy ring, but there is less there than meets the eye.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-214-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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