Well-written, vastly informative history of a largely unknown land, by Bobrick (Fearful Majesty, 1987). Bobrick chronicles a Wild West show played out on the ice and tundra that began with raids by outlaw Cossacks in 1581. By the early 18th century, Russia was bringing the territory under control, setting the stage for Vitus Bering's famous explorations, which culminated in the acquisition of Alaska. Bobrick's descriptions of Bering's unthinkably huge expeditions driving across the ice, through the Aleutians to Alaska, with their doctors, scientists, writers, philosophers—and near-starvation and disasters—come off like a nightmarishly hallucinogenic version of Lewis and Clarke. His depiction of local culture is sophisticated and detailed: ``Among the Chukchi there was no term for `girl' at all, but only for `married woman,' `woman living alone,' and `woman not yet put in use.' '' The author masterfully conveys the waves of immigration and the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, an achievement on a par with the building of the Panama Canal. Brutality is a constant: The discovery and extermination of the Aleuts are no more horrible than the civil war unleashed after WW I, with psychopathic brigands on one side, possessed zealots on the other. In the background are the prison camps, created by the czars ten years after the 16th-century Cossack invasion, carried forward for profit by Stalin. Powerful and moving—it's difficult to imagine a book that could say much more about Siberia, or say it better. (Sixteen pages of b&w illustrations, maps—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-66755-6
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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