A lively history of Chinese-Russian political and cultural symbiosis.
A cultural chronicle of the rich Chinese-Russian interplay and exchange from the 1920s to the 1950s.
McGuire (History/California State Univ., East Bay), who has lived and worked in both Moscow and Beijing, tells the stories of the many pioneering Chinese who became passionate students of Russian language and revolutionary thought and participated in exchange programs over the decades. She focuses on two waves of Chinese travelers: those politically active in the 1920s who were excited by the Bolshevik Revolution as having gone further than the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in China in 1911 and were eager to learn more; and those committed Communists who wanted to deepen the Sino-Soviet “friendship” of the 1950s. The author develops her thesis through the metaphor of romance, following specific stories—e.g., a circle of young Chinese students of Beijing University who were inculcated in the New China Movement and its magazine New Youth, which had offered translations of Russian literature. Newly opened institutions such as the Shanghai Foreign Languages School and Moscow’s Eastern University recruited the first Chinese students, including the son of Chiang Kai-shek, Jiang Jingguo, who was shocked by his father’s betrayal of his communist allies in 1927 and stayed in the Soviet Union for the next few years, marrying a Belorussian woman. Other love affairs between Chinese and Russians helped to enrich the cultural exchange. McGuire devotes a chapter to the legendary first wife of Mao Zedong, He Zizhen, who accompanied him on the Long March, bore him six children, and ended up a jilted wife studying in Moscow in the late 1930s. Sadly, many of the Sino-Soviet “love children” would be abandoned to Russian orphanages. Russian culture, especially cinema and music, invaded China in the 1950s, inspiring a new postwar generation that was “both politically correct, and, at times, hopelessly romantic.”
A lively history of Chinese-Russian political and cultural symbiosis.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-064055-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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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