Whiting revels in the seamy side of Japan. One of the mysteries of the Orient is how an ultra-orderly, respectful, duty-bound culture can coexist with a corruption-riddled political and business world. Whiting, a journalist based in Japan (You Gotta Have Wa, 1989), notes this tension but offers no explanations; indeed, this is not the place to look for insights into Japan or even its criminal element. If you want lurid stories featuring colorful miscreants and shady deals, however, this book is for you. Whiting picks up the action during the post-WWII American occupation period, where shortages of everything produced a widespread black market. Among those trying to cash in was Nick Zappetti, an American soldier who remained in Japan after his discharge and whose first score involved smuggling 20,000 lighter flints inside a Ford convertible. A lifetime of wild schemes, one solid business venture—the first American-style restaurant featuring pizza in Tokyo—and several tense encounters built Zappetrti’s’s reputation for toughness and earned him the mostly honorary title of “king of the Tokyo mafia.” While the book is loosely (very loosely) organized around Zappetti and includes description of a personal life even more amusing than his criminal activities’setting records for number of marriages to Japanese women by a foreigner and number of lawsuits filed in the Japanese courts—there is no shortage of characters here: Rikidozan, the judo-chopping wrestler who began his career as a mobster by starring in professional wrestling matches as the vanquisher of hulking Americans; Machii, the Tokyo gang boss who was always accompanied by a bodyguard half his size; Tanaka, the politician who took the art of political corruption to new levels. The presentation is entirely anecdotal with no pretense at analysis, but Zappetti’s life would hold anyone’s interest.
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-41976-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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 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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