Martin goes on too long, but offers much good information along the way about a decidedly strange and dangerous land.
A sharp-eyed look at a cold and hungry outpost of the Axis of Evil.
Former Newsweek bureau chief Martin first traveled to North Korea in 1979, and what he found was a near-religious cult of personality centered on the person of Kim Il-sung, known variously as the Great Leader, Fatherly Leader, Respected and Beloved Leader, and so on, a partial listing of whose reputed achievements “would have aroused the envy of a Leonardo da Vinci or Thomas Jefferson.” And of a Priapus: as Martin writes in this sprawling and not often titillating work, Kim and his son and successor Kim Jong-Il apparently each take seriously the notion of being the father of their country, each setting aside great numbers of women for personal service. The list of special favors continues on and on: as his country descended ever deeper into poverty and famine in the late 1990s, Kim Jr. “kept a 10,000-bottle wine cellar and liked shark’s fin soup several times a week,” hosting banquets that lasted for days on end; when Kim Sr. reached his 70th birthday, his son order the construction of a commemorative version of the Arc de Triomphe, “larger than the Paris original,” just one of the many monuments built in a program that would be a major drain on the country’s economy. But no matter: the Kims, Martin writes, have created a command economy par excellence as part of the exceptionalist doctrine called juche, which means something like “national self-reliance” but really translates to something like Great-Leader-first. As for whether the bizarre Kim Jr.’s North Korea is a threat, Martin suggests that the nation’s nuclear arsenal should give the world pause. But, he adds, that doesn’t seem to be stopping Asian companies from “teaming their capital with the cheap labor of the North, where workers for foreign-invested joint ventures earned $100 to $400 a month.”
Martin goes on too long, but offers much good information along the way about a decidedly strange and dangerous land.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32221-6
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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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