Discouraging but insightful.
Books on the increasingly pugnacious Vladimir Putin, seemingly Russia’s president for as long as he wants, are not in short supply, but this short, shrewd analysis stands out.
“Not since the days of Reagan,” writes New Left Review editorial board member Wood, “has Russia seemed so central to US political life—and not since the depths of the Cold War has it been so unambiguously assumed across most of the political spectrum that Russia is the United States’ principal enemy.” There is less there than meets the eye, according to the author, who maintains that Putin is simply carrying on the policies of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Leaving the KGB in 1991, Putin made his reputation as a hardworking, absolutely loyal functionary. As designated successor in 2000, his first decree granted Yeltsin lifelong immunity from prosecution. Drunken and unpopular, Yeltsin was an easy act to follow, but Putin had a stroke of luck. Oil prices, the major source of government income, reversed their decline, allowing much of the population its first taste of prosperity. No more liberal than his predecessor but more efficient, Putin brought the media under government control, hobbled rival political parties without eliminating elections, and converted Russia into the “imitation democracy” that Western observers deplore. Few influential Russians, Putin included, pine for the old Soviet Union. The sole exception is its superpower status, whose loss rankles, and Wood believes that America’s greatest mistake was rubbing their nose in it by expanding NATO into Eastern Europe and meddling in areas like Ukraine and Georgia, Russia’s backyard. The amenable Yeltsin complained bitterly, and Putin’s push back—e.g., the annexation of Crimea—was popular at home. Wood concludes that Putin has no great ambition except to stay in power and that successors will demonstrate the same patriotic fervor and deal with the same internal problems and dependence on oil prices that vex Putin.
Discouraging but insightful.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78873-124-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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