A superb work of travel and reportage, and must reading for Russia hands.
An eye-opening tour of post-Soviet Russia by a young but well-seasoned Time correspondent.
Years spent in Moscow and environs have given debut author Meier a decent command of Russian and plenty of insight into the way things work there. Yet, as he slyly remarks, “Longevity in Russia does not always yield understanding. Neither does intimacy guarantee knowledge.” Perhaps depressed by years of living in a building where the light bulbs kept disappearing, ten of them being worth a bottle of vodka on the black market, and apparently stricken by the thought that Moscow, though with a population exceeding that of many European nations, might not be representative of the country as a whole, Meier undertook a journey in all cardinal directions that brought him to some hellish locales and introduced him to some iffy cuisine (“plates of glabrous chicken and half-fried potatoes” being among the finer offerings). One was Chechnya, where he found Russian soldiers playing backgammon with the rebels whom they would later be killing, yet one of the strange scenes out of what those soldiers have taken to calling “Putin’s War.” Another was the fantastically remote Siberian city of Norilsk, “a severed world,” Meier memorably writes, “a Pompeii of Stalinism that the trapped heirs of the gulag still called home.” Yet another destination on Meier’s itinerary was Sakhalin Island, where Chekhov once documented the broken lives of prisoners and exiles whose descendants seem to be doing only marginally better. Meier writes with a fine, literate style that sometimes turns to bare-chested bravado, but that thrives on pointing out ironies: the fact that most of those gulag denizens wanted nothing more than to be seen as loyal comrades of the monster Stalin, the fact that Boris Yeltsin, then a Communist functionary, was so drunk on a visit to Sakhalin that he failed to notice that the island’s governor had replaced the obligatory portrait of Lenin with one of Adam Smith.
A superb work of travel and reportage, and must reading for Russia hands.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05178-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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