A sympathetic, brave work from a deeply engaged war correspondent.
Norwegian journalist Seierstad (The Bookseller of Kabul, 2003, etc.) movingly reports on the bleak fallout from the wars in Chechnya.
Her atmospheric and heartbreakingly sad text records two treks to the newly independent Muslim country: in 1995, shortly after the disastrous invasion by Russian troops under Boris Yeltsin, and again 12 years later when the war raged anew under Vladimir Putin. Seierstad was a 24-year-old rookie journalist eager to join the fray (despite warnings of sniper attacks) when she hitched a ride with Russian troops into Grozny in 1995. She found the city emptied of men, who were fighting in the mountains, and full of starving, terrified women. Its hospitals, orphanages, waterworks and homes had been demolished by Russian attacks. The Chechens’ lives had been blown apart by war, and thousands of orphans had been left to survive on their own. Following the author’s initial trip, Aslan Maskhadov was elected as Chechnya’s first president in 1997. He proved unable to control the spread of wahhabism, a radical form of Islamic fundamentalism that split the country and led to new conflict with Russia. After Maskhadov’s assassination in March 2005, Seierstad found her way back into the country and met Hadijat, called the Angel of Grozny because she never turned away a child in need. In her unofficial orphanage Hadijat and her husband Malik cared for scores of children who had been abandoned, abused and traumatized, left with few prospects for education or a future. The author listened to these suffering youngsters and chronicles their tales of torture, deportation and misery. She also offers her observations on the absurdities of Chechnya’s new, Soviet-style dictator Ramzan Kadyrov, who simply denied the existence of 20,000 orphans. Chechens pride themselves as fearless freedom fighters and frequently take the wolf as their symbol, Seierstad notes, but they “forgot that the wolf is a beast of prey that mercilessly pursues every weak, defenseless animal.”
A sympathetic, brave work from a deeply engaged war correspondent.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-465-01122-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
HISTORY | 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 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
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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