A perceptive peek at an upwardly mobile immigrant family.
Chinese and U.S. relations viewed through the lens of a single family.
Historian Brooks (Between Mao and McCarthy, 2015) follows the members of a little-known but fascinating Chinese American family from the late-19th century through the years following World War II. In 1883, patriarch Moy Sing emigrated first to San Francisco, then to Chicago, where he set up a gambling parlor. In 1892, he was able to bring his wife to America, and the two finally settled in New York. They eventually had 12 children, six of whom survived to adulthood, and it’s around the lives of these six that Brooks builds her story. The author structures the history in snappy chapters, most only a few pages long, each focusing on a year or two in the life of one family member or another. The result is a soap opera in the best sense of the term. These lives contain more than their share of drama, with divorce, suicide, betrayal, illegal activities, political divisions, business successes, and failures all playing a role. Any one of the siblings would be worthy of their own book, and together they reveal the intriguing complexity of family and second-generation immigrant life. All six attended public school, with most graduating from college, took American names, and preceded to move up, down and sideways economically. Two stayed in the New York area, while the others moved back and forth between New York and Shanghai, hoping to better themselves in China but brought home by political changes there. Brooks thoroughly examines the impact of war and the Great Depression, the growth of Communism, and the American prejudice against the Chinese, without neglecting the effects of personality and family dynamics on persistent Kay, idealistic Ernest, flighty Alice, and all the rest.
A perceptive peek at an upwardly mobile immigrant family.Pub Date: March 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780520409552
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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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