Visitors of Russia and social historians alike will benefit from Merridale’s thoroughgoing research and lively writing.
Comprehensive study of Moscow’s walled city, for centuries a byword for power, secrecy and cruelty.
“The Kremlin’s history is a tale of survival, and it is certainly an epic, but there is nothing inevitable about any of it.” So writes Merridale (Contemporary History/Queen Mary Univ. of London), author of the excellent Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (2006), casting subtle doubt on the claims of the Putin government and its assertions of imperial destiny. Glorifying the past, of course, is a way to take eyes off the present, though the stratagem can sometimes backfire. What is of central importance to the history of the Kremlin and, by extension, that of Russia, is the capacity of its builders to return time and again to scenes of utter destruction and start from scratch. Or not quite from scratch, since, as Merridale notes at the close of her book, Russians were recently delighted to learn that the workmen who had been ordered to destroy the Kremlin’s Orthodox religious icons in the 1930s had defied Stalin’s orders and instead painted them over; and so skillfully that the paint can (comparatively, anyway) easily be removed and the icons restored. Stalin naturally figures heavily in these pages, a ruler whose apparatus was extremely effective in delivering cruelty. What is just as interesting, and perhaps surprising to most readers, is the role of non-Russians in making the Kremlin over the centuries, from a Venetian master builder to German craftsmen fleeing the religious wars of their homeland—to say nothing of the Byzantine hierarchy to whom Russian religious leaders used to answer.
Visitors of Russia and social historians alike will benefit from Merridale’s thoroughgoing research and lively writing.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8680-5
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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
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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