An intricately layered account of the eastern Baltic, a land shaped by colonization, revolution, deportation, and murder.
The rich and tragic history of an obscure part of the world: the eastern Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia.
Egremont dives deep into the story of the Baltic frontier, an area largely controlled by foreign powers since the 12th century. Colonized by Russia, Sweden, and Germany, invaded by the Nazis and then the Red Army, the people of the Baltic have suffered domination imposed by outsiders since the days of the Crusades. The author paints an astute portrait of the Baltic Germans, the aristocracy that moved in by papal invitation during the Crusades and accumulated land, money, and power until World War I. He capably re-creates their vanished cultural world: poetry readings, croquet, halls lined with works by the old masters. But in this geographically vulnerable part of Europe, wealth was no protection against invasion. In World War II, Hitler ordered the Baltic Germans to move to a conquered area of Poland, and the Jews they relied on were executed, many shipped to concentration camps. Latvians and Estonians were drafted into the German army, and the Nazis laid plans for mass deportations of Estonians, Latvians, and their neighboring Lithuanians. After World War II, anyone perceived as an opponent of the Soviet-led regime was sent to labor camps in the Soviet Union. Today, both countries are independent republics, and one Estonian observes, “there’s no class system. It’s money that counts now.” The Russian threat is never far away, and the locals stockpile petrol and strategize the quickest way out of the country in the event of an invasion. Egremont seems to have read every Baltic German novelist, visited every notable town, and tracked down every living witness to its history. The narrative sometimes meanders, but the book contains a helpful gazetteer and chronology. The text requires serious concentration, but diligent readers are rewarded with a near-total immersion into a land, its people, and the harrowing arc of its history.
An intricately layered account of the eastern Baltic, a land shaped by colonization, revolution, deportation, and murder.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-16345-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
