A rather dry account of the failure of Communism in Eastern Europe, told by an expatriate Romanian academic (Political Science/Univ. of Maryland)—long on background, well documented, but plodding as narrative. The best feature of Tismaneanu's history is his exposition of recent events in Romania, about which little is known in this country. He is able to place the monstrosities of the Ceausescu regime—its xenophobia, megalomania, and almost Pharaonic obsession with monuments and public works—within the context of what he calls ``Asiatic despotism,'' and from there he makes a distinction between the Balkan states (Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Romania)—which had never really been considered (or considered themselves) a part of Europe—and the Central European nations (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany), which unmistakably were. The difficulty facing the Balkan states, in Tismaneanu's view, is that their desperate poverty and long history of foreign political administration have prevented them from developing almost any of the attributes of the ``civil society'' upon which all modern democratic states rely (e.g., effective representative governments, strong national—as opposed to tribal- -identities, uncontested territorial borders). The Central European nations, he says, while suffering immensely from a near-total breakdown of industry and commerce, have at least a strong political cohesion and so can face the future with a good deal less dread. The background history that Tismaneanu supplies—especially in regard to the political movements that swept the region between the world wars—is helpful and interesting, but this is essentially a theoretical book, not a history, and pursues its theory on a surprisingly abstract plane. Strangely removed from the events it describes, and needing a much larger dose of praxis. Readers interested in the extraordinary events of 1989 would do better to look at Mark Frankland's The Patriots' Revolution (reviewed above).
Pub Date: April 3, 1992
ISBN: 0-02-932605-2
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
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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