A stranger-than-fiction thriller that puts the bitter conflict between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan into clear, human perspective. Kaplan (coauthor, Yakuza, 1986) uses the opportunistic life and violent death of Henry Liu to trace how the PRC and so-called Nationalists have fought for the allegiance of 20 million overseas Chinese. Born in 1932, Liu fled to Taiwan—where Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT) had set up shop—after Mao's forces had overrun the mainland. Trained in the KMT's elite Political Warfare Academy, Liu wangled his way into a journalism career, mastered English, and made it to the US in 1967, settling in Washington, D.C., where he eked out a living as a translator and correspondent for publications in Hong Kong as well as Taipei. Eventually gaining American citizenship, Liu moved to northern California, where he and his wife ran a successful gift shop in San Francisco. A respected man of letters in both Chinas, Liu played both ends against the middle, accepting expense-paid trips to the PRC, serving as an FBI informant, and taking payoffs from the KMT. Dismayed by Liu's lack of devotion to their cause, high-ranking Nationalist intelligence agents recruited hit men from Taiwan's underworld, who assassinated the writer in 1984. Dogged work by local police, who unearthed a taped confession left by one of the killers, led to the solution of the murder. Kaplan does a fine job of explaining and recounting the savagery with which the KMT suppressed dissent throughout the world as well as on its island fortress. He also addresses (without dwelling on) the comparative ease with which the repressive regimes of presumptive American allies like Chile, Iran (under the Shah), the Philippines, and South Korea as well as Taiwan have been able to wage undeclared wars against their ÇmigrÇ enemies in the US. A brilliantly reported, if occasionally repetitive, account of geopolitical rivalry as a blood sport. (Eight-page photo insert— not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-689-12066-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
