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
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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