A collection of perceptive essays from a top Asian scholar who sheds considerable light on how Japan managed to become a world- class economic power following its defeat in WW II. Among other arresting judgments, Johnson (Pacific International Relations/Univ. of California, San Diego; MITI and the Japanese Miracle, 1981) contends that samurai capitalism is quite unlike its Darwinian equivalents in Europe and North America on several important counts. To begin with, he states, the island nation engages in an effective form of producer economics that views markets as means, not ends. In addition, respected government ministries provide domestic industry with administrative guidance that permits corporate enterprises to pursue essentially mercantile goals without paying much attention to the interests of either employees or stockholders. The author dates the ascendancy of this prestigious, professional bureaucracy (which created what he calls a developmental state) to the destruction of Japan's military during the US occupation. Mounting trade deficits and the end of the Cold War have induced Washington to reappraise America's relations with Dai Nihon and the Far Eastern countries that have followed its economic lead. For the most part, Johnson concludes, neither US policy makers nor the mass media have a realistic understanding of how Japan's commercial practices (which have precious little concern for the welfare of home-front consumers) differ from those in the West. Expanding on this theme, he examines language barriers, Tokyo's bonds with nations comprising what it once referred to as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the reform-resistant system that passes for democratic politics in Japan. Addressed as well is the outlook for a renewal of the ties that once bound the US to an ally that no longer appears to value its gaijin security blanket. Authoritative perspectives on a consequential country that remains indominatably foreign for most of the West. (Graphs and tabular material)
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03739-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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 Yorkerstaff 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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