Dark but skillfully painted pictures at an exhibition.
Former NPR Moscow correspondent Feifer (The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan, 2009) returns with an analysis of the Russian character derived from his family history and many years of research and travels.
In a volume that’s very current—the author delivers commentary on both Pussy Riot and Edward Snowden—Feifer presents a series of topics that, combined, paint a stark and only mildly hopeful portrait of Russia. Poverty, drinking, cold and punishment—these are among his principal subjects. Throughout, the author uses a variety of techniques: memoir, interviews with significant Russians and others in the region, summaries of key historical events, and anecdotes about and documents from family and friends (his father is also a writer about the region). Feifer is resolutely anti-Putin, condemning him continually for returning the country to some of its nastier ways after the fall of the Soviet Union and the elevation of hopes in the West. (He writes that Putin’s abilities are “feeble at best.”) In the opening chapter on poverty, the author offers some grim evidence about living conditions in the country: inefficient health care (HIV-AIDS is a major problem), racist hate crimes, the breakdown of infrastructure and corruption everywhere. Conversely, he follows with a chapter about the vast wealth in the country, mostly from energy; the author (and others) recognizes that Russia’s dependence on energy income presents a long-term problem. The Russian fondness for vodka, writes the author, may be a cliché, but it’s one based on oceans of evidence. Feifer chides the Russian government for doing little about the problem, and he writes about Russian families, the roles of women, the attitudes toward gays and other minorities, racism and anti-Semitism. He highlights the cronyism and the pervasive corruption, and he warns Western countries not to have any “illusions about what kind of country they are dealing with.”
Dark but skillfully painted pictures at an exhibition.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0964-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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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