McMeekin assembles an impressive body of research but struggles to find a new perspective.
A wide-ranging examination of how the concept of communism was a key driver of the conflicts of the 20th century—and remains a significant force.
McMeekin, author of such acclaimed books as Stalin’s War, July 1914, and The Ottoman Endgame, traces the arc of communism through early Marxist theory to the rise of the Soviet Union, followed by China and a series of smaller entities. The ideological path ran from utopian idealism to state control and then totalitarianism, with the most awful expression being the bloody Year Zero experiment in Cambodia, in which communism “was reduced to its essentials, as a negation of everything existing, a war of the young on the old, a social leveling of society down to equality in abject poverty and misery.” McMeekin identifies the late 1970s as the high-water mark, but the rot of corruption and stagnation had set in, and the collapse was remarkably quick. The author is unquestionably knowledgeable about his subject, but much of this information has been covered in such books as Richard Pipes’ Communism and Archie Brown’s The Rise and Fall of Communism, among numerous others. McMeekin provides more focused discussions of individual nations—especially China—that have abandoned the central tenets while retaining the mechanisms of state control. He asserts that these countries are still communist, but he is selective with the facts to fit his argument. In the closing pages, he notes the rise of authoritarian thinking in democratic countries, with “modern-day thought commissars.” “Far from dead,” he writes, “Communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started,” which feels like a definitional sleight of hand. Perhaps the author will explore this subject further in future work, but the current book is a look backward down a well-traveled road.
McMeekin assembles an impressive body of research but struggles to find a new perspective.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781541601963
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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