Lacks the soul-fire of a Doctor Zhivago, but this is a memorable depiction of what Pasternak called Russia’s “damned...
A small saga of memory, loss and reconnection in a land where millions of people have disappeared for political purposes.
Boris Bibikov specialized in finding—and sometimes inventing, it would seem—the kind of heroic worker for whom socialism was invented and without whom socialism could never exist, such as a machinist who assembled an excavator in six days, “not two weeks as the manufacturer’s guide said.” Bibikov also took it upon himself to “raise the level of socialist consciousness” of the workers in the Ukrainian factory he helped oversee, spending afterwork hours teaching Marxist-Leninist theory to the rank and file. Regrettably for him, his experience of the famine of the winter of 1931–32 caused him to doubt the eternal wisdom of supreme leader Josef Stalin, whose agents must have sensed a change in Bibikov’s thinking and so came for him with a Black Maria in the middle of the night. Matthews, Bibikov’s grandson and the Moscow bureau chief for Newsweek, travels to his ancestral homeland to examine its soul in the wake of communism, an era in which “Russians had lost much of their culture, their religion, their God; and many of them also lost their minds,” in which an “absolute, bottomless nihilism” had now replaced totalitarianism. Matthews’s travels yield an affecting family memoir, centered on not just Bibikov but also his daughter, who married Matthews’s English father after considerable travail involving his expulsion from Stalinist Russia and years of efforts to extract Lyudmila from it, efforts that have an epic quality all their own. The memoir ranges from the child’s-eye view of a grown-up world that “smelled of French cigarettes and Darjeeling tea” to an aware, adult comprehension of lives marked and marred by privation, terror and uncertainty—and to a reckoning of what Russians paid for the deformed social experiments of their rulers.
Lacks the soul-fire of a Doctor Zhivago, but this is a memorable depiction of what Pasternak called Russia’s “damned capacity for suffering.”Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1714-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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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