A fast-paced political thriller about a book that terrified a nation.
The derring-do–packed history of “one of the first efforts by the CIA to leverage books as instruments of political warfare.”
In the 1940s, poet and translator Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) set out to write an epic of the “incredible time” during the years surrounding Russia’s revolution. The result was Doctor Zhivago, “a sad, dismal story,” as he put it, about a poet-physician and his personal and political trials during four decades of upheaval and repression. Washington Post national security editor Finn and teacher and translator Couvée chronicle the intrigue over the book’s publication in Europe, its initial reception and the vociferous opposition it generated in the Soviet Union. Though Pasternak anticipated significant censure, he insisted that his manuscript be smuggled to the Italian editor who agreed to publish it and serve as international agent. The book, Pasternak said, had “become the most important thing in my life.” He wanted it “to travel over the entire world…lay waste with fire the hearts of men.” An immediate best-seller in Italy in 1957, it was acclaimed in Germany, England and France; the following year, the microfilmed manuscript arrived at CIA headquarters. The CIA had long been translating, publishing and sending to Russia books with a “humanistic message” of freedom of opinion and personal respect. “Books were weapons” in the Cold War, the agency maintained. Although publishing Zhivago proved convoluted and frustrating, the agency managed to send several hundred copies to the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, where the Vatican Pavilion agreed to cooperate: From a table behind curtains at the back, Russian visitors eagerly grabbed their contraband. Soviet response was swift and crushing, intensifying after Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. Denounced as a snob, a “bourgeois individualist” and a traitor, he was expelled from the prestigious writers’ union and shunned even by those he had considered friends; his long-suffering wife and mistress feared for their lives.
A fast-paced political thriller about a book that terrified a nation.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-90800-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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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