A thorough account of the alliance between two very different leaders, although written with an extreme pro-Soviet tilt.
A comprehensive study of the wartime cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union, as directed by Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin.
When America entered World War II, the Soviets were fighting for national survival. Stalin desperately needed aid from capitalist America both during and after the war and went to great lengths to please Roosevelt in order to get it. Roosevelt wanted the war to end with the formation of a peacekeeping organization more effective than the League of Nations had been, and he needed both American and Russian participation to achieve this goal. He therefore aimed to draw the previously isolated Soviets into the club of responsible power diplomacy while also acknowledging Russia as an indispensable military ally. Journalist Butler (East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart, 1997, etc.) describes in meticulous detail the proceedings at the Tehran and Yalta conferences, the only times that Roosevelt and Stalin met in person, and shows how the American president, "the glue holding together the alliance," frequently mediated between Stalin and Churchill to keep the allies pulling together. The most striking aspect of the narrative is the portrayal of the big three. Roosevelt appears always as farsighted and sure-footed. Butler clearly loathes Churchill, whom she regards as a racist imperialist "more concerned over preserving Britain's position in Europe than in preserving peace.” Her attempt to claim a moral equivalence between Stalin's rule and British colonial administration is particularly errant. Stalin steps straight out of Soviet propaganda from the 1930s: a wise, perceptive, benign old man. The author asserts that his power rested on charm, not fear; he rehabilitated religion in Russia; he wanted a strong, independent and democratic Poland; he had no intention of imposing communism on European countries by force, and so on. All of this is difficult to credit.
A thorough account of the alliance between two very different leaders, although written with an extreme pro-Soviet tilt.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0307594853
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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