A thoughtful, intense read that will appeal to fans of the short story format, used here to great effect.
A collection of short stories about the Eastern European experience in both the old country and the new.
As the Iron Curtain descended over Eastern Europe in the mid-20th century, a steady flow of emigrants fled to begin new lives in North America. Yakimov (Ashes of Wars, 2011) imagines a series of personal histories for both those who ventured west and those who stayed behind. Part I paints a picture of a modern Canada, a melting pot of ethnicities where there’s tolerance for cultural differences but perhaps not yet true mutual understanding and equality. In an apparently autobiographical story, “Resume of an Engineer,” a female engineer struggles to regain the respect and professional footing she enjoyed in Europe. In the title story, a man, despite having mixed feelings about both the old country and the new, acts as a go-between for fellow immigrants. Part II explores lives that continue to be lived in a changed Europe amid political upheaval, from the forced redistribution of land to the pervasiveness of alcoholism. “Zorah’s cottage,” the defining story here, is a history of a family home in which hope and contentment briefly rekindle, flicker, then die out. Yakimov writes evocatively and with lush expressiveness: “Thick, heavy mist hangs over the flanks of the peak and the mountains, spread out to both sides of it like a white shroud suspended from the sky.” Yet bleakness pervades her narratives. Her characters suffer—both from internal and external causes—and moments of happiness are tempered by troubles that remain unchanged by fortune or geography: family conflict, addiction, loneliness, difference, etc. A recurring theme throughout the stories is the immigrant returning to his or her homeland in the post-Communist era only to find that the reality no longer matches the memory. It’s a familiar motif, but Yakimov (who, like many of her characters, immigrated to Canada as an adult) handles it deftly, managing to avoid the obvious clichés.
A thoughtful, intense read that will appeal to fans of the short story format, used here to great effect.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-5957-1410-0
Page Count: 180
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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