Hard-hitting and timely given Russia’s continued sway in international politics as well as its documented influence over an...
A chilling look at the Putin regime’s murderous suppression of its critics.
In 2017, observes Guardian foreign correspondent Harding (The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, 2014, etc.), the Russian president will likely stand again for the office, and winning it—as he certainly will—will put him in the running to be the longest-serving ruler that nation has seen. Meanwhile, under his regime, Russia has “gone from a semi-democracy into something approaching a dictatorship.” No one has been more aware of that transformation than Russia’s journalists, one of whom, Alexander Litvinenko (1962-2006), had been assembling evidence of Putin’s links to Russian organized crime, combining to form a “mafia state.” Litvinenko was silenced by assassins who used polonium to poison him, the first such case in medical history. Litvinenko happened to be in London at the time, which means that the assassins had to enter a country with which Russia was not at war in order to conduct murder, making the case a matter of national security interest. However, Harding writes with mounting indignation, the British government steadily backed down in the face of Putin’s continued aggressions not just against his own citizens, but also in the Crimea. By the author’s account, British Prime Minister David Cameron effectively helped cover up what had by then become the well-known fact of official murder, determined not to harm trade interests. The British government, said one observer, was worried about Putin’s ire, while British intelligence agents were worried about meeting Litvinenko’s fate; Putin was “concerned about being called a mafia boss.” In this fast-paced book, Harding, who was expelled from the Kremlin while serving as the Guardian’s Moscow bureau chief, covers all the bases while exposing the weakness and accommodationism of the now-departed British leadership.
Hard-hitting and timely given Russia’s continued sway in international politics as well as its documented influence over an incoming American administration that is also hostile to the press.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-97399-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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