A well-crafted exposé that suggests that the Cold War began half a century earlier than we’ve been told.
Deep dive into an episode of history that is little known but deserves more exposure.
In 1918, Lenin withdrew Russia from the war against the Triple Entente, having agreed secretly with Germany to do so. U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing, “a bored pacifist who doodled and daydreamed in Cabinet meetings until Lenin seized power,” concocted a plot to overthrow Lenin, install a leader friendly to the Allies, and bring Russia back into the war. Woodrow Wilson, writes journalist Carr, overcame his scruples about self-determination and signed off on the plan. Soon, Allied spies were in Moscow gathering information and concocting schemes; one of them, the author suggests, served as the model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond. At the same time, an Allied expeditionary force landed in Archangel, in the Russian Arctic, and engaged with Bolshevik forces, who fought vigorously across a broad front. On the military front, the author shows, the Allied effort was doomed for many reasons: Americans were under British command, never a good formula given national resentments; Allied soldiers of all nations questioned what they were doing in Russia, a former ally, especially when Germany and its allies surrendered; mutinies sprang up along the Allied lines; and when the soldiers finally returned, the U.S. and U.K. governments took pains to sweep the whole thing under the table, undervaluing the efforts of the blameless fighters. Carr’s cast of characters includes some improbable figures: a prison interrogator who later moved to France and invented Chanel No. 5 “to capture the essence of snow melting on black earth”; an American journalist who served two separate prison terms in Russia and then teamed up with filmmaker Merian C. Cooper to make the vaunted documentary Grass; and a “hardened terrorist” named Fanny Kaplan who resisted first the czar and then the Bolsheviks, plotting an almost successful assassination of Lenin. Some reads like history, some like a spy novel, and it’s always eye-opening.
A well-crafted exposé that suggests that the Cold War began half a century earlier than we’ve been told.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-317-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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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