A culturally vibrant account of Russians uprooted to Paris during a tumultuous time.
The bestselling author of The Romanov Sisters returns with the story of the Russian aristocrats who made Paris their home after fleeing the Bolshevik coup.
Early on, Rappaport, an expert on imperial Russian history, notes how “the Russian discovery of the French capital…goes back to the time of…Peter the Great, who made a visit to Paris in 1717 and fell in love with Versailles.” This affinity for Paris reached its apex during the Belle Époque, when the excesses of Russian aristocrats became notorious around town. “The French press,” writes the author, “regularly titillated readers with stories of the vices and eccentricities of the grand dukes.” The events in Russia from 1905 onward caused increasing anxiety for the aristocracy and fear for safety of the extended Romanov family. At the same time, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company was storming Paris with its shocking modernist music and dance, and other artists—e.g., poet Ilya Ehrenburg and painters Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine—were “electrified,” as Ehrenburg put it, by the abundant culture of Paris. The author delineates the plight of both the Russian elite, who had to abandon their great wealth in land and palaces while pining for a restoration of the monarchy, and the truly impoverished immigrants who drove taxis, took up needlework in Chanel’s fashion house—“twenty-seven fashion houses were established in Paris by Russian emigres between 1922 and 1935”—or toiled at dozens of other low-paying jobs. At the time, the new arrivals were often characterized as quarrelsome or prone to dissent. As in her previous histories, Rappaport drives her lively narrative with minibiographies of notable characters, including Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin and noted humorist Teffi. Many of these artists’ lives were stunted well into the 1930s by enforced dispossession and poverty. Throughout, the author, a consummate historian, displays her deep research into the era, the city, and its denizens.
A culturally vibrant account of Russians uprooted to Paris during a tumultuous time.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27310-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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