Narrative history at its best, with patient unfolding of events unknown and forgotten—but that have consequences even today....
Quick: What was the Crimean War about?
If you can’t easily answer the question, or even locate the Crimean War within a couple of decades of the mid-19th century, then you are not alone. As Figes (History/Birkbeck Coll., Univ. of London; The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, 2007, etc.) notes, even in France, which lost some 100,000 soldiers in the conflict, the Crimean War is very nearly forgotten. The author locates the origins of the war—now remembered almost exclusively for the so-called Charge of the Light Brigade—in several proximate causes. The clash of three ambitious empires (Russian, Ottoman and British) was one; related to it was the growing Russian Orthodox presence in the Holy Land, and related to that the rivalry among Islam, Catholicism (and Anglicanism) and Orthodox Christianity. The French “were most alarmed by the growing Russian presence in the Holy Lands,” writes Figes, and they pressed for ways to contain it—and not just that, but also the growing Russian influence in the Balkans, still dominated by the Ottomans. Louis Napoleon found perhaps unexpected allies in the British, rivals with Russia for dominance in Central Asia; for the Ottomans, meanwhile, the conflict was one in just many with Russia. The author ably chronicles the savagery of all parties—drawing on hitherto unknown Russian and Turkish archives, he reckons that the death count was more than 1 million, including the unfortunate dead of the besieged Russian city of Sevastopol—and illustrates the utter modernity of this first “total war.” Figes closes with a fascinating account of how the war shaped the nations that fought it; in Russia, for instance, it helped launch the later pan-Slavic movement and is commemorated as a noble defeat against Britain’s “aggressive imperialist aims in the Black Sea”—in short, as a foreshadowing of the Cold War and the “clash of civilizations” among Islam and the West.
Narrative history at its best, with patient unfolding of events unknown and forgotten—but that have consequences even today. A thoroughly impressive book.Pub Date: April 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7460-4
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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