A cautionary tale of science gone terribly wrong.
Russian geneticist and ethicist Birstein takes a well-documented and highly disquieting tour through the abominations of Soviet science.
Buttressing his contentions with recently declassified Russian state documents, Birstein argues that Soviet-era scientific academies were pawns of the state, in particular the secret services, and that their activities were subordinated to the needs—some good, but mostly bad and ugly—of the state’s survival. Perversions of scientific integrity ranged from the ravings of Lysenko to the construction of nuclear weapons. But what primarily interests Birstein is the scientific community’s role in developing biological and chemical weapons to fight enemies of the state and its willingness to test these weapons on humans. The subjects were prisoners, often those about to be executed, who were pumped with poisons designed to be used for assassination or tested with drugs to determine their suitability for interrogation. Thus the Soviet Union joins the shameful list of countries (including the US, Germany, Japan, and Britain) that have used humans for unethical biomedical experiments. Birstein names names, both in the hopes of understanding the individual motivations of the state agents and to pay tribute to those who resisted these activities. The latter’s stories are inspirational in the extreme. Occasionally, Birstein slips into overeasy judgments (e.g., the Bolshevik's “naked desire for power behind their grand promises”), which sounds alarms for readers to proceed carefully. Yet mostly he is impassioned but credible, and perhaps most distressing when he notes that “the present secret service is not ashamed of the past” and may well be conducting similarly barbaric experiments on Chechen prisoners today.
A cautionary tale of science gone terribly wrong.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2001
ISBN: 0-8133-3907-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
