An informative study of a part of the world too often ignored, told with vigor, color, and authority.
An epic history of Eastern Europe, from pagan days to an uncertain future.
Eastern Europe is a great arc of countries stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, although the names and number of them have varied over time. Indeed, some of the most striking parts of this book are the maps, which show how the boundaries within the region have changed over time. Mikanowski, a Portland, Oregon–based journalist, has traveled much of the territory, seeking traces of his half-Catholic, half-Jewish ancestry. The author covers centuries of empires rising and falling, pogroms and invasions, brutal dictators and snatches of artistic beauty. Most of the countries that currently exist were stitched together as geopolitical compromises, with the crosscutting cleavages of separate faiths, languages, and ethnic backgrounds. With so much history, the book could have easily become a dark, unwieldy canvas, but Mikanowski adds stories and personal anecdotes, many of them involving his own family, to provide a sense of balance. “This book is not a family history,” he writes, “but my family history forms a braid running through it…my ancestors are at the root of everything I write.” The author also delivers a few jokes along the way—e.g., “Eastern Europeans share one legacy in common, and that is a gift for seeing comedy in tragedy.” The nadir was the Nazi era of occupation, although the Stalin period often rivaled the Nazi horrors. The collapse of the Soviet Union presaged a period of economic hardship, which slowly dissipated as capitalism took root. Mikanowski is not sure where the region is heading, but he asks the world to acknowledge its diversity and potential, and he proves to be a capable guide to countries and cultures that many readers may have never encountered.
An informative study of a part of the world too often ignored, told with vigor, color, and authority.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781524748500
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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