An extraordinarily detailed account of the last czar’s last days.
The fall of clueless Russian Czar Nicholas II.
Although hobbled by an absolute monarchy and slow to industrialize, Russia was getting its act together by the end of the 19th century. Its czars, although often reactionary, took governing seriously. Hasegawa, professor emeritus in history at UC Santa Barbara and author of Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan, emphasizes that Nicholas was an exception. He became czar at age 26, when his father died prematurely, though he had already shown little aptitude but much fascination with the trappings of power, if not the details. Scholars universally deplore his marriage to German princess Alexandra, who was far more strong-willed than her husband and became wildly unpopular. The book delivers a compelling biography of the pair up to early 1917, when Russia’s wartime miseries erupted in widespread violence. In meticulous detail, Hasegawa recounts the czar’s imprisonment and the bloody end of his dynasty. It’s a scholarly tour de force in which the author has absorbed the participants’ massive documentation and familiarized himself with a huge cast of characters, most unfamiliar even to history buffs. This should not be anyone’s introduction to the Russian Revolution, but readers of Robert K. Massie’s classic 1967 Nicholas and Alexandra and its follow-up, The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, will appreciate the events revealed by Hasegawa’s fine-tooth comb.
An extraordinarily detailed account of the last czar’s last days.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781541606166
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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