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NATASHA’S DANCE

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RUSSIA

A superb, enlightening work.

An immensely learned, ambitious effort to view Russian history through the lens of its arts, music, and literature.

A skilled practitioner of both narrative and intellectual history, Figes (History/Univ. of London; A People’s Tragedy, 1997, etc.) takes his title from a scene in War and Peace in which the highly cultured Natasha Rostov forgetting the French-influenced mores of the court to perform, enthusiastically and precisely, a Russian peasant dance. Natasha has never performed that dance, but she somehow knows it in her bones—just as, Russian intellectuals have long insisted, there is something genetic, something inborn, about “Russianness.” Figes charts the growth of this sense of difference over generations, as Russians eventually shed the Western-imitating ways of Peter the Great (whose capital, Petersburg, “differs from all other European cities by being like them all,” according to Alexander Herzen) to create their own sense of identity. This Russianness borrowed from many traditions; there is no single authentic Russian culture, Figes insists, any more than there is a single American one, “no quintessential national culture, only mythic images of it.” Natasha’s dance, for instance, takes in Mongol, Persian, Kazakh, ethnic Russian, and other cultures, just as Petersburg was built of stone from Finland, Sweden, Poland, Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries alongside Russian limestone. Just so, Soviet culture was an amalgam of traditions, continuous with its predecessors though with a peculiar purpose: to “train the human mind to see the world in a more socialistic way through new art forms.” A high level of seriousness pervades this excellent study, but Figes still has great fun with his subject, as when he recounts a testy meeting between Stravinsky and Shostakovich, both of them sitting in complete silence until Shostakovich asked, “ ‘What do you think of Puccini?’ ‘I can’t stand him,’ Stravinsky replied. ‘Oh, and neither can I, neither can I,’ said Shostakovich.”

A superb, enlightening work.

Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2002

ISBN: 0-8050-5783-8

Page Count: 712

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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