Reminding us that Americans do not hold the monopoly on conspiracy theories, Knight analyzes the dramatic events and repercussions surrounding the murder of Sergei Kirov. In December of 1934, Leningrad Party Chief and leading Communist Kirov was murdered in a deserted corridor of party headquarters by a disenchanted ex-Communist named Nikolaev. The mysteries of the assassination are fascinating and myriad. Kirov’s bodyguard, who was somehow detained further down the corridor and didn—t even witness the murder, died en route to an interview with Stalin the next day, allegedly as the result of falling out of the truck in which he was being transported. Kirov’s office had been relocated to a distant portion of the main corridor while he was away. How could Nikolaev have entered the building unnoticed? These are but a few of the enigmas that arise on opening this Pandora’s box. There have been countless attempts to solve the case, from Stalin’s arrival in Leningrad the day after the murder to investigations headed by Khrushchev and Gorbachev. In this, her latest book dealing with the Soviet secret police, Knight (Spies Without Cloaks: The KGB’s Successors, 1996, etc.) draws a compelling picture of Kirov—a bright man and a gifted orator who rose from childhood poverty and incarceration under the tsarist regime to the highest levels of Communist leadership. In Knight’s view, the Kirov murder case served as a prototype of party and secret police complicity. Not only did Stalin use the murder to launch a campaign against Leningrad, she contends, but he planned it as a pretext for launching his massive purges. “No one, it seems, was untouched by what had happened on the first of December 1934.” Thus the Kirov murder raised questions for the entire nation about its leadership’s legitimacy. While some experts might argue with Knight’s conclusions, general readers will be drawn to her narrative of this fascinating case and its continued grip on the Soviet/Russian political imagination. (26 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8090-6404-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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