Volkov is a stern critic and a smart observer of the Russian scene, and this book, a fine complement to Orlando Figes’s...
Wide-ranging study of the arts in Russia during the Communist era, bracketed by a decade of relative freedom on either end.
Expat radio journalist Volkov (Shostakovich and Stalin, 2004, etc.) opens his fluent, swiftly moving narrative with Leo Tolstoy, who, though strongly identified with the preceding century, “dominated both the cultural and the political life of the early twentieth century also.” Tolstoy was an especially strong influence on Maxim Gorky, valued by Lenin as a writer and propagandist and enshrined as the author of canonical retorts to anticommunist dissidents, but murdered—allegedly—by Stalin’s agents all the same. One of the greatest surprises here, for readers reared on Solzhenitsyn’s accounts of the Gulag, is that Stalin could be clement and merciful, even argued with: Nobel Prize winner Mikhail Sholokov, for instance, replied to a withering query from the Boss about his vodka consumption with the remark, “A life like this, Comrade Stalin, will drive you to drink.” Volkov defends Sholokov against the charges that his novel The Quiet Don was plagiarized, noting that Sholokov threatened to denounce the Soviet regime if his writing was in any way hindered: “You have to be certain of your own genius to write like this to Stalin; it’s unlikely that an ordinary plagiarist would be so bold,” writes Volkov. Others, such as the eccentric writer Andrei Platonov and the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, did not fare so well, and Stalin kept Russia’s prisons and graveyards well stocked with intellectuals. Post-Stalin cultural figures, such as the poet Joseph Brodsky and pop singer Vladimir Vysotsky, had no end of trouble with the regime but at least were not killed. The KGB, Volkov notes, even decided to permit rock concerts in the 1970s, reasoning that otherwise the youth movement would be driven underground and keep on growing all the same.
Volkov is a stern critic and a smart observer of the Russian scene, and this book, a fine complement to Orlando Figes’s Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (2002), is essential for anyone following modern political and cultural events there.Pub Date: March 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4272-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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 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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