This survey of Croatian history fills in some gaps but falls short where readers most need guidance—in understanding the nature of President Franjo Tudjman's government and the Croatian Serbs' early fear of it. Tanner (Ticket to Latvia, 1990) served as Balkan correspondent for London's Independent during the heady years from 1988 to 1993. Reflecting the book's subtitle, he emphasizes the sacrifices Croatia has made to win independence, ranging from medieval times to the present, thereby implicitly portraying Croatia as a victim in a war with no recognized innocents: ``Apart from Bosnia,'' he asserts, ``no other state in Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union suffered such material destruction and loss of life on the road to statehood.'' Tanner's prose is generally fluid; his narrative, drawing on most of the standard secondary sources, suffers from a surprising lack of inside information or anecdotes. Even the chapters on recent events rely primarily on published sources. The most important error of judgment on Tanner's part is his reluctance until the book's final pages to write unambiguously about the less pleasant aspects of Croatian history. Until his description of recent Croatian atrocities in the Bosnian war, Tanner adopts a glib and evasive approach to important aspects of Croatia's past and present: Tudjman's anti-Semitism and his fascist-sounding remarks are presented as attempts to make ``concessions to the extreme right of a symbolic nature.'' He devotes a mere paragraph to the Jasenovac concentration camp, the central symbol of postwar Croatian Serb fears. Gruesome details about the camp, widely available, are reduced to the observation that during the recent war ``the executions were frequently messy affairs.'' While correctly noting that the Serb question will long haunt Croatia, Tanner never explores the ways in which Croatia might have allayed Serb fears and gained a peaceful path to independence. A superficial study lacking rigor and clarity.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-300-06933-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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 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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