A Russian scholar opens up new, even startling historical connections.
Fresh research at the Foreign Ministry in Moscow (since closed) yields an insightful new look at Russia’s pivotal role in the making of World War I.
In this massive yet palatable work of research, scholar Lieven (Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace, 2010, etc.), a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the British Academy, concentrates on Russian foreign policy as it maneuvered through shifting currents of “modern empire” and nationalism in the years leading up to Russia’s entry in the war. The author emphasizes how the notion of imperialism was as pertinent within Europe as outside of it, namely in Austria’s regard of Serbia as existing within its own orbit. Similarly, Russia was casting envious glances at Constantinople and the straits as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. Moreover, the fate of Ukraine—its population, industry, and agriculture—would tip the balance of European power as decisively then as it has today. Lieven engagingly sets out his history on two levels: the “God’s-eye view,” encompassing the big themes of geopolitics and balance of power; and the “worm’s-eye view,” which depicts how a handful of male leaders made the crucial decisions within a two-week period in July 1914, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, that would affect millions of people. Factors that fed international tensions included Germany’s paranoia regarding Russia and the sense of an inevitable war between “the Teuton and the Slav,” the role of the press as it “rattled and bedeviled policy makers,” the lack of trust in Czar Nicholas II, and the rise of ethnic nationalism. The Russian empire’s internal makeup was enormously complicated, and Lieven painstakingly walks readers through the important precursors—e.g., the revolution of 1905 and the Anglo-Russian entente of 1907—while introducing the key decision-makers.
A Russian scholar opens up new, even startling historical connections.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-670-02558-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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