"It's a smart, tough, scrupulous book," Ward Just wrote here in 1999.
No such objection can be made to Timothy Snyder's morally scrupulous book "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin" (2010), which also spotlights Eastern Europe -- in particular the region comprising the Baltics, Ukraine, Belarus, Western Russia and Poland that Snyder calls "the bloodlands," because they were the greatest killing field of the Second World War.
I won't call it documentary, but the place where I wanted to make the book scrupulous was in the portrayal of the milieu, the neighborhood itself.
The ensuing trial, and the rest of Brodsky's relatively short but prolific life (he died in 1996, at fifty-five) isuperblyly documented in Lev Loseff's "Brodsky: A Literary Life," which Gessen deems a "loyal, scrupulous, and authoritative" book about the poet who, when asked at his trial what he had done for his motherland, famously answered, "I wrote poems.
Stalin was not directly responsible for the Holocaust, but his pact with the Nazis paved the way for Hitler's killing of Jews in the east.Mr Snyder's scrupulous and nuanced book steers clear of the sterile, sloganising exchanges about whether Stalin was as bad as Hitler, or whether Soviet mass murder in Ukraine or elsewhere is a moral equivalent of the Nazis' extermination of the Jews.
Bailey's books are scrupulous and compassionate, written with enough panache to fortify readers as they power through these cheerless denouements.
A poet is a writer with a scrupulous spirit, that's what books had taught me, so I came to London with a volume of Scottish verse and an essay I'd written about Wallace Stevens.
Matar is too scrupulous to contemplate that; the book was completed in November last year, when uncertainty, no doubt, still seemed an absolute.
(We know as much as we do about the calamity thanks to Daniel Defoe, who chronicled it in scrupulous detail in his 1704 book, "The Storm". Widely credited as the father of the modern novel, Defoe also pioneered the genre of the modern disaster narrative).
Scrupulous in his journalism, in his books he was capable of inventing in order to make a truth even truer.
