Part biography, part travelogue, a perceptive, sad and very personal analysis of the decline of a once-great nation.
An exploration of Russia's demographic decline through the life of a dissident priest.
“The Russian nation is shriveling away from within," writes Bullough (Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus, 2010), the Caucasus editor for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. More Russians are dying than are being born, and they are dying young, often from the results of chronic alcohol abuse. Bullough set out to understand why, examining the life of the nation through the life of a single man, Dmitry Dudko (1922–2004), a Russian Orthodox priest. Sent to the gulag for writing anti-Stalin poems, Dudko was rehabilitated under Khrushchev but became a notorious dissident by preaching hope and trust to people denied both by the Soviet state. Arrested again under Brezhnev, he was broken by the KGB, recanted his opposition to the state and ended up churning out anti-Semitic propaganda. "His fate parallels the fate of his whole nation,” writes Bullough. “Through the twentieth century, the government in Moscow taught the Russians that hope and trust are dangerous, inimical and treacherous. That is the root of the social breakdown that has caused the epidemic of alcoholism, the collapsing birth rate, the crime and the misery." The author attempts to enrich his conception of the connection between Dudko’s history and Russia's lamentable condition by undertaking a pilgrimage to sites significant in his subject’s life: his seminary, the camp where he was imprisoned, the churches where he preached, his homes and his grave. In a vivid, colorful account of his journeys, Bullough starkly chronicles the visible evidence of Russia’s despair in abandoned villages, ruined farms, shuttered factories and ubiquitous drunkenness. Though the author sees some hope in the new generation’s resistance to Putin’s electoral frauds, his optimism sounds like whistling past the graveyard of a dying society.
Part biography, part travelogue, a perceptive, sad and very personal analysis of the decline of a once-great nation.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-465-07498-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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