by Christopher Goscha ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2016
A vigorous, eye-opening account of a country of great importance to the world, past and future.
America was not the first world power to meet defeat in far-distant Vietnam. The reasons for that loss emerge from this welcome overview of that nation’s history.
Sometimes, as with Richard Grant’s book on the Mississippi Delta, Dispatches from Pluto (2015), it helps to have American events explained by a non-American. Here the explainer is Goscha (The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam, 2016, etc.), a historian at the Université du Québec, the thing being explained a decadelong war in a country whose history reaches back millennia. The author’s survey gathers force when he enters the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the establishment of French Indochina, which set up the events that would culminate in war. The French government in Indochina enjoyed a great deal of local autonomy, for good or ill. Among those ills, the author notes in a fascinating aside, was forcing a Romanized alphabet on the country in the place of the classical Chinese ideograms, which “distanced Vietnamese from the East Asian civilizations in which they had moved for centuries.” They may have been unmoored, but nationalists still arose to claim independence, led by the “educated young” who had been schooled on the French model. Enter the Americans, who aimed to suppress this movement after the French failed to do so. Goscha poses a number of counterfactual questions: what might have happened if the cease-fire of 1954 held? What would have ensued if the Americans had not made the French war their own—and, as he points out, had not shouldered 80 percent of the cost of the French war to begin with? The devastation visited on the country in the “hugely assymetrical” American war remains shocking to contemplate; one Viet Cong leader characterizes it as an “experience of undiluted psychological terror.” Goscha closes by noting recent trends that might fulfill the planks of the republican movement of a century ago—and threaten the communist government accordingly.
A vigorous, eye-opening account of a country of great importance to the world, past and future.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-09436-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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 Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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