An eye-opening political bio of Hideki Tojo, Japan's premier for much of WW II. As the indefatigable Hoyt (The Last Kamikaze, p. 117, etc.) makes clear, Tojo was not a charismatic leader in the mold of Hitler or Mussolini. More good soldier than statesman, he was appointed premier by Emperor Hirohito on October 17, 1941, at the behest of career Army officers intent on maintaining the parliamentary control they had seized in 1937. ``A limited man'' who governed largely at the pleasure of fellow militarists, Tojo never gained dictatorial powers. Nor, in the wake of punishing defeats, did the latter-day samurai go gently into that good night that envelops ousted pols. Having let the side down, however, he was obliged to resign on July 18, 1944, and then was all but ignored until shortly after V-J Day, when occupation forces charged him as a war criminal. Hoyt does a fine job of explaining the factional clashes, infighting, and external events that not only put Tojo in high office but also kept him there despite egregious blunders. Despite the warrior's support for an unavailing campaign to bring India within the Japanese orbit, and his failure to resolve ruinous interservice rivalries on the home front, Tojo was able to keep political peril at bay thanks to the Doolittle raid, the Allies' demand for Japan's unconditional surrender, and constitutional curbs dating back to the Meiji Restoration. While at the helm, though, he acquiesced in the atrocities that imperial troops committed against both POWs and the civilian populations of conquered enemies. A stoic loser who accepted ``victor's justice'' as his fate, Tojo (who had botched an earlier suicide attempt) died by the noose in Tokyo's Sugamo Prison on December 23, 1949. A revelatory portrait of an Axis kingpin whose intriguing story has been overlooked, at least compared to the coverage accorded his German and Italian counterparts.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8128-4017-8
Page Count: 264
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
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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