A well-rendered account of a history too little known in the West.
Hands up: Who knew that American forces once invaded Russia?
The Russian Civil War, writes Mawdsley (Modern History/Glasgow Univ.; Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945, 2006, etc.), began just as soon as the Russian Revolution did. Lenin’s Bolsheviks moved swiftly to consolidate power, repressing the socialists who dominated the nation as a whole but who were weak in the industrial cities. At the same time, Cossacks, monarchists, cadets and other foes of the new regime took up arms, while “the civilian opponents of the Bolsheviks, people of the moderate Left and Right, lacked effective combat forces of their own and played no parts.” The contending extremist armies, Red and White, would be locked in war for the next three years, with units from the British, American and French armies appearing on various fronts to battle the Bolshevik forces. The state established a program of what the regime called “War Communism,” taking emergency measures that in some cases turned out to be permanent. Radical policies of appropriation and state monopoly, backed by a powerful army, “helped the Bolsheviks to take power,” writes Mawdsley, even if “as the months passed . . . the political benefits came to look more dubious” as productivity plummeted and food shortages gripped the nation—driving many farmers, in the bargain, into the anticommunist camp. The Whites soon began to lose the fight, however, routed at places such as Tsaritsyn, a city on the Volga that would be renamed Stalingrad. Mawdsley attributes the loss to many factors, from being outnumbered and outgunned to the staggering incompetence of many White generals and the lack of central coordination among the anti-Bolshevik forces. Sporadic fighting continued until 1922 in Siberia, carried out by figures such as the Baron Ungern-Sternberg, “an unbalanced Baltic nobleman . . . already notorious for his atrocities in Transbaikal.” After that time, though, Soviet domination was complete and would endure for another seven decades.
A well-rendered account of a history too little known in the West.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-933648-15-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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