An affecting travelogue that reveals true Russian personality.
Adventures in Russia over three trips in 20 years.
In 1995, Los Angeles–based ghostwriter Dickey ventured to Russia in her late 20s in order to perfect her Russian and ply her trade as a writer. A fortuitous advertisement and encounter with American photojournalist Gary Matoso resulted in a three-month trek from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg, where Dickey was based, meeting people in the Russian hinterlands and chronicling personal stories along the way. After her initial trip resulted in a blog, the author returned in 2005 to track down many of the same people the journalist duo had met in 1995. Finally, in 2015, Dickey returned alone to write this spirited account of regular Russians living in a vastly changed landscape from her 1995 visit. Moving back and forth to compare her earlier trips, Dickey witnessed the rise of tourism, once virtually unheard of; the flourishing of the once-vilified Jewish community in Birobidzhan despite the fact that many of the Jewish people she first met in 1995 had left; the rise of small entrepreneurs struggling in the wake of the “ruble krizis” such as in Chita, in eastern Siberia; the Buryat farmers of Galtai, who still slaughter sheep in the manner of Genghis Khan; the environmental damages to the magnificent freshwater Lake Baikal; the underground gay scene in Novosibirsk; and the travails of a Moscow rap star, among other stories. Now in middle age and married to a woman in LA, Dickey had to come out to many of her Russian acquaintances unfamiliar with lesbianism, and she dreaded their disapproval. However, despite the general anti-Western sentiment she endured—President Barack Obama was considered untrustworthy, while Ukraine was claimed as Russian—the author presents nuanced portraits.
An affecting travelogue that reveals true Russian personality.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-09229-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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