A learned, literate travelogue about a cultural cornucopia.
A closely observed study of a region often overlooked, but of critical importance in world history.
Everywhere he goes in the Baltic, the Dutch novelist and essayist Brokken encounters authority, past and present. Arriving in Latvian waters aboard a battered coastal freighter, he’s confronted by suspicious border guards, one of whom asks, “What’s so special about the Baltic?” When he answers, “Mariners say it’s the most beautiful of all the seas,” they discover that Brokken is a writer and deem him to be “crazy, not dangerous.” In Latvia he finds a brilliant cultural legacy, personified, for one, by the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who credited the Bolshevik Revolution with making him an artist and took up arms against his own father, an anti-Bolshevik engineer who designed some of Riga’s most noteworthy buildings. Riga’s prodigiously accomplished artistic community claims diaspora members in Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, as well as Mikhail Baryshnikov, whose father was a Soviet soldier who, even after Stalin’s death, “continued to hold Stalinist views, which made him doubly hated.” Much of that community was Jewish, destroyed by the Nazis and homegrown anti-Semites during World War II. Similar atrocities occurred in the other present-day republics: Vilnius, Lithuania, once had the largest synagogue in the world, but “ninety-nine of the city’s one hundred shuls were burned to the ground, bombed, smashed to rubble, or…simply demolished.” Small wonder that those who fled Vilnius, including the writer Romain Gary, took care never to mention it. Much of the Baltic’s past is painful, but the future looks hopeful, so long as the republics can remain free of an ever-threatening Russia. Indeed, Brokken writes, even young people in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad are optimistic, hoping that it “would become the Hong Kong of the north…but with greater scope for independence.”
A learned, literate travelogue about a cultural cornucopia.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781922585837
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribe
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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 Yorkerstaff 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
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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