Amazing reporting, generous pictures, and the author’s true sense of connection with the locals add up to a truly honest...
An intrepid German journalist recounts his 2016 adventures in the far-flung reaches of Russia.
Orth (Couchsurfing in Iran: Revealing a Hidden World, 2018, etc.), who served for nearly a decade as the travel editor at Der Spiegel, seems to crave learning about places other people would never dream of visiting—e.g., Mirny, Sakha Republic, in the far east of Russia, affectionately termed “the asshole of the world” due to its massive diamond-mine operation. The author is clearly unafraid of confronting “anti-aesthetics on a scale that makes you faint,” and he is determined to look deeper than the information provided by official Russian sources. In this quirky, subtly revealing work, Orth provides a useful snapshot of the character and tone of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The author’s 9,500-kilometer journey began in Moscow, where his host was Genrich (from couchsurfing.com), a hypereducated polyglot with dozens of pages of initial interview queries who turned out to be an ideal conversationalist. Other hosts proved intelligent and keen, as well, such as when Orth visited the chess capital, Elista, in the autonomous Republic of Kalmykia; Astrakhan, on the Volga River; a farming community in Volgograd, in the southwest; or Sevastopol, the home port of the Black Sea Fleet, in the newly annexed Crimea. Orth also traveled to former Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s hometown of Yekaterinburg; there, the author reports that “in 1991, 71 percent of Russians considered themselves European…by 2008 the figure was only 21 percent.” From the Altai Republic in Siberia, where the author ventured for a week of crazy car travel with Nadya, to a retreat near Lake Baikal to the remote Olkhon island in Siberia, Orth manages to bring forth a side of Russian life rarely seen.
Amazing reporting, generous pictures, and the author’s true sense of connection with the locals add up to a truly honest view of Russia today.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-77164-367-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Greystone Books
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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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