Scrupulous academic account that ultimately fails to do full justice to the chilling fascination of its subject. The bland subtitle that Knight (Senior Research Analyst/Library of Congress) chooses signals both the strengths and weaknesses of this first full-scale biography of Stalin's infamous police chief Laventrii Beria—``My Himmler,'' as Uncle Joe nicknamed him. Exploiting the mass of documentation newly available from former Soviet archives, Knight traces with forensic precision the sometime architectural student's rise, through the bloody ranks of Lenin's Cheka and its Stalinist successors in Georgia during the USSR's formative years, to oversee Stalin's massive edifice of organized state terror from 1938 until the dictator's death in 1953. Implicit in Knight's matter-of-fact account is the claim that Beria was singular less for his ruthless violence than for his adroit negotiation of Soviet internal politics and his canny currying of favor with Stalin. Yet the broader context of the culture of terror in which Beria's ghastly talents flourished remains hazy: Knight supplies no ethical or moral account of Stalinism, and few contemporary figures beyond Beria himself, his grim master, and familiar names such as Khrushchev, Malenkov, and Molotov emerge distinctly. Moreover, those new to the murderous intricacies of Stalinist infighting may find clarity retreating under a mass of initials, patronymics, and organizational acronyms. Knight readily acknowledges Beria's ``evil'' but does too little to help her readers understand it; hence her subsequent heavy stress on his unexpected emergence, in the frenzied power struggle that followed Stalin's death, as a pragmatic reformer—hardly absolution, most readers will feel, for a lifetime otherwise unblemished by loyalty, compassion, or common decency. In avoiding sensationalism or unbridled psychological speculation, Knight forgoes a full apprehension of the pathology of Beria and the system that bred him—without which many may choose not to endure the man's odious company. (Illustrations)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-691-03257-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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