This comprehensive, detailed book reiterates and deciphers a critical chapter in Asian and global history.
A study of Indonesia’s complex, conflicted, and inspiring path to freedom.
Despite being the fourth most populous country in the world, Indonesia often seems to float on the periphery, unknown and ignored. Van Reybrouck, a historian with connections to the region and author of Congo: The Epic History of a People, sheds valuable light on Indonesia’s struggle for independence, which became a liberation model. Before the Dutch arrived with imperial dreams in the 19th century, Indonesia was a sprawling archipelago of disparate kingdoms and sultanates. It was unified under a colonial administration, but cultural divisions persisted. When the Japanese conquered the region during World War II, they were welcomed as liberators, although it soon became clear that they were worse than the Dutch. A national consciousness and a generation of anti-colonial leaders soon emerged, most notably the charismatic but volatile Sukarno. The one-named leader declared independence soon after the Japanese surrender, but making the new nation work was problematic. The Dutch tried to reclaim their former position but eventually realized that the country no longer had a place for them. Sukarno unified the communists, nationalists, and Islamists, although once the colonialists had been expelled, the coalition fell into disarray, leading to a cycle of violence and retribution. Sukarno’s government became increasingly chaotic and socialistic, and when he was displaced by an American-sponsored coup, another round of bloody strife followed. Van Reybrouck manages to keep this convoluted account flowing, punctuating the story with interviews to provide a human dimension. At nearly 600 pages, the book is not an easy read, and it has a huge cast of players. Nevertheless, anyone who wants to understand Asian political development and the process of decolonization will find it a useful, important text.
This comprehensive, detailed book reiterates and deciphers a critical chapter in Asian and global history.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781324073697
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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