A judicious audit of what happened or may have happened to the vast riches controlled by Russia's Romanoffs before they were executed by Bolshevik irregulars in the wake of the 1917 Revolution. Drawing on previously inaccessible Kremlin files, other archival sources, and globe-trotting legwork. Clarke (former financial editor of the London Times) first offers a brief but vivid history of the events leading up to the mid-1918 murders of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and at least two of their three daughters. He goes on to examine the recently developed forensic evidence that leaves only the monarch's heir (the hemophiliac Alexis) and one (as yet unidentified) daughter among the missing. He assesses the chances that Anna Anderson, who claimed to be the storied Anastasia, and Michael Goleniewski, the self-styled tsarevich, were telling the truth. Getting down to business, Clarke documents his painstaking search for the putatively lost wealth of the Romanoffs through Berlin, London, Moscow, New York, Paris, and other world capitals. As it happens, there were precious few assets left. The Communist regime confiscated virtually all of the extended family's in-country possessions, including art works, bank deposits, estates, and jewelry. The author also concludes that the deposed sovereign spent most of his ready cash to keep his consort and children in modest comfort. Nor, he proves, did the tsar have a hoard of gold stashed in the Bank of England; the billion on deposit there had been transferred by the state for safekeeping at the start of WW I and was eventually used to repay war debts. Despite the best efforts of ÇmigrÇ fortune hunters and their lawyers, moreover, no tsarist treasure trove has ever come to light, although Clarke hints there just may be a cache in Geneva. A fiscal detective's exhaustive accounting that focuses on the monetary aspects of an imperial dynasty's harsh fate. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13118-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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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