A nuanced look at deep complications underneath stories of asylum seekers in their journey “from tyranny to liberty.”
A densely researched examination of the defector program constructed in the West as a response to Soviet restriction of movement during the Cold War.
The harboring of defectors from the Soviet Union in their “leap to freedom” was a tremendous coup for the West. However, as historian and Russian Review editor Scott shows in this multilayered academic study, it was also a delicate balancing act between the two Cold War powers. The right to seek asylum was affirmed in the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and refugee protections were later detailed in the 1951 Geneva Convention. Although originally designated as those who fled from the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, political defectors came to encompass migrants from China, Vietnam, Cuba, and elsewhere in the socialist world. The backgrounds of the defectors were diverse—from artist to sailor to politician to embassy administrator—and their cases often uneasily straddled the “political and ideological fault lines of the Cold War.” In the U.S., the National Security Council created a defector program by the early 1950s, with the aim of selecting Soviet defectors who could be helpful in relaying intelligence information and whose stories of flight would aid the Cold War narrative of West versus East. However, not all defectors were welcome, nor did they have an easy time adjusting, and many even returned to the Soviet Union. Scott looks at many cases that were more complicated than that of Victor Kravchenko, “the Soviet official who fled while on assignment in Washington [and] published I Chose Freedom in 1946, just as the battle lines between the Cold War’s superpowers were being drawn.” Scott makes a strong argument that limiting border movement became an integral part of “globalization’s architecture” and that “defectors were both the catalysts for the delimiting of previously open spaces and the most visible representatives of the consequences of enclosure.”
A nuanced look at deep complications underneath stories of asylum seekers in their journey “from tyranny to liberty.”Pub Date: July 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780197546871
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
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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