Swashbuckling tales from the history of European competition for control of Central Asia. Beginning in the 1820s, Great Britain and Czarist Russia became convinced that their fates lay in that vast and mainly unexplored expanse of land from Iran to China. From its colonial jewel in India, Great Britain feared Russia’s inexorable march through Central Asia to its colonial borders, Russia of course feared Great Britain’s inexorable march to its own borders, and both were driven by the Kiplingesque desire to bring “civilization” to a benighted people. And so, as one contemporary termed it, the “great game” was afoot, via war, espionage, adventure, and a cast of characters as bizarre as any Indiana Jones film could assemble. Journalist Meyer (The Plundered Past, 1973, etc.) and documentary filmmaker Blair Brysac denounce the game as foolish and in the end largely futile for either side, but they quite enjoy telling the tales of the men and women who played it: the British horse doctor who spent five years exploring Tibet, Afghanistan, and Bokhara; the mad Russian explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky; Madame Blavatsky, the Russian founder of Theosophy who played a mysterious role in the intrigues of Central Asia; Sven Hedlin, the Swedish explorer and Nazi favorite who lived for years in Tibet and fed the Fuhrer’s odd fascination with that land. Rogues, fools, mystics, and the occasional wise observer are all finely etched here. This is a cautionary tale as well, for as little as the great game profited Great Britain and imperial Russia (the authors avert their eyes from its effects on the peoples of Central Asia), it continued to be played by the United States and the Soviet Union with disastrous results—witness the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and unleashing of religious zealotry in the region with which the US must now contend. A ripping, timely, and perceptive yarn. (16 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-58243-028-4
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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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