Gripping, disturbing stories of life under an oppressive yet wildly popular autocrat.
Memorable portraits of Russians living under Vladimir Putin.
In his first book, New Yorker Moscow correspondent Yaffa begins with Yuri Levada, a pioneering sociologist whose massive survey during the collapse of communism showed plummeting enthusiasm for a strong leader, desire for an honest appraisal of their nation’s history, and more personal responsibility. He concluded that the passive if wily “Soviet Man” was disappearing in favor of a self-reliant individual yearning for freedom. In 2000, Levada reversed himself. Following the disastrous 1990s, Russians welcomed Putin, and they continue to give him approval ratings of over 80%. This is in “no small measure a product of the state’s monopolistic control over television, the media with the widest reach, and its squelching of those who would represent an alternative.” After this introduction, Yaffa delivers eight long, engrossing New Yorker–style profiles. One of the most significant of these figures is Konstantin Ernst, head of Channel One, Russia’s largest TV network. “Even as Channel One faithfully transmits the Kremlin’s line,” writes the author, “it does so with a measure of professionalism and restraint” and demonstrates genuine creativity in apolitical areas such as culture and history. Among Yaffa’s other powerful portraits are those of a saintly doctor who became a national hero caring for children during the gruesome Russian-Ukraine insurgency but found herself roped into endorsing the Russian side in a war she hated; a patriotic Russian entrepreneur in Crimea who despised living under the inefficient, corrupt Ukrainian government—while he rejoiced at Putin’s takeover, he discovered that life was harder under a more efficiently corrupt Russia; and a human rights crusader who, frustrated at her impotence, took a job in the government human rights office, a largely ceremonial position that now and then allows her to do a good deed.
Gripping, disturbing stories of life under an oppressive yet wildly popular autocrat.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-52-476059-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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 Yorkerstaff 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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