An uneven but still useful documentation of the disturbing reach of a dangerous world leader.
The global investigations editor at BuzzFeed News examines “Kremlin-sanctioned killing around the world.”
British journalist Blake (co-author: The Ugly Game: The Corruption of FIFA and the Qatari Plot To Buy the World Cup, 2015) builds on a June 2017 BuzzFeed News exposé to delineate how Vladimir Putin and his Russian assassins have murdered political opponents over the years. Some of the killings occurred within Russia, but the author focuses on the assassinations of dissidents who escaped from Russia to the U.K. To a lesser extent, Blake also discusses those who fled to the United States. To assist readers in understanding the context of each death, Blake provides detailed explanations of why world leaders—including Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—believed Putin might liberalize Russian society and become an ally of democratic nations. That severe misreading led the British and U.S. leaders to deemphasize the significance of the assassinations ordered by Putin. Along with her BuzzFeed colleagues, Blake accuses the British and U.S. governments of coverups, which have taken various forms—e.g., labeling murders as suicides, withholding gory details of the deaths, and conducting desultory law enforcement inquiries so that journalists would feel discouraged about publishing information that might agitate their readers. Blake explores the highly publicized murder of Russian reporter Anna Politkovskaya, but that case is an outlier in a narrative filled with foreshadowing about which dissident will be killed next. As the author shows, the 2006 death of Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko not only eliminated a high-profile Putin opponent; it also showed “Putin to be just as brutal as his critics claimed, and finally the world was listening.” The most thoroughly documented case is the death of Boris Berezovsky, a wealthy Russian exile who delighted in taunting Putin from afar. Though well-researched, the narrative sometimes bogs down in the author’s discussions of Russian and British politics. When Blake focuses on the circumstances surrounding the murders, the narrative moves more smoothly.
An uneven but still useful documentation of the disturbing reach of a dangerous world leader.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-41723-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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