by Bruce Jones ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 2021
Knowledgeable and wonky, largely of interest to policy planners.
The director of the Brookings Institution project on international order revives an old strategic tenet: Who rules the oceans rules the world.
Four basic facts come into play here: The world’s oceans are increasingly zones of contention, particularly between the U.S. and China; most of what we call globalism is an oceanic phenomenon, since, as Jones writes, “more than 85 percent of all global commerce is a function of sea-based trade”; the oceans are the epicenter of global communications, thanks to the undersea cables that carry data; and the oceans are the sources of a tremendous amount of mineral wealth. Small wonder they’re the object of so much attention on the part of the superpowers, sometimes forging unlikely alliances—Muslim Malaysia, for instance, with China, despite China’s aggressive anti-Muslim policies. Traveling around the world to visit such centers as Singapore’s Changi Naval Base and China’s Yanghan Port, the world’s largest container port, and boarding vessels such as the Madrid Maersk, “the world’s largest trading ship” in 2019, Jones examines the geopolitics of ocean power. Along the way, he looks into the history of standardized shipping, courtesy of the multimodal container, and delves into what are likely to be future patterns of energy use—with India, for instance, joining Japan and China in becoming dependent on oil shipped via the Straits of Hormuz, another sharply contested zone. The book is marred by small errors—Malcom, not Marshall, McLean was the innovator behind the metal container; the Arctic, not Antarctic, lies above Maine; the weather current that alternates with El Niño is not El Niña but La Niña, etc.—but the author’s points are well taken, especially when he warns that China “is fast becoming a fuller maritime power than the United States,” with implications for political relations in years to come.
Knowledgeable and wonky, largely of interest to policy planners.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982127-25-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
HISTORY | BUSINESS | WORLD | WORLD | INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS | PUBLIC POLICY | ECONOMICS
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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