A brave, passionate book setting Russia’s invasion and Ukraine’s resistance into the broad sweep of history.
An award-winning writer explains the cultural background to Putin’s ill-fated invasion of Ukraine.
As an independent journalist, Zygar, author of The Empire Must Die and All the Kremlin’s Men, has long been an outspoken critic of Putin and especially his invasion of Ukraine. After the Kremlin made opposition to the war illegal, the author fled his native Russia and went into exile in Germany, where he continues to work as a columnist. In this authoritative book, Zygar provides historical context for the invasion and rejects Putin’s claim that Ukraine has never been a legitimate political entity. The result is a sprawling text with hundreds of characters, stretching from the time of Peter the Great to the present. Zygar describes Russia’s impulse for empire building as akin to a drug. “Imperial history is our disease; it is inherently addictive,” he writes. Ukraine has often been the victim of this addiction, and it has been repeatedly attacked, occupied, and dismembered only to rebuild itself. The most remarkable aspect of the story is that over the centuries, the spark of Ukrainian independence has never been fully extinguished, and it caught fire when the Soviet Union collapsed. Putin believes that he is destined to reconstitute the Soviet empire, but Zygar argues convincingly that it will all end badly. As the author shows, Putin is increasingly isolated and paranoid, losing touch with reality. Zygar calls on Russians to come to genuine terms with their bloody history and reject the state-sanctioned version of events. The failure of the most recent invasion could be the trigger for this process. This is not an easy read, and sometimes the narrative seems like a quagmire of names and claims. Still, Zygar’s knowledge is undeniable, and the book is worth the effort for those who want to understand the bigger picture.
A brave, passionate book setting Russia’s invasion and Ukraine’s resistance into the broad sweep of history.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781668013724
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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