Atlantic Cities contributor Jaffe (The King's Best Highway: The Lost History of the Boston Post Road, the Route that Made America, 2010) provides a dual biography of a Japanese nationalist ideologue and the American psychiatrist who examined him at the Tokyo war trial after World War II.
The rise of Japan on a mission of pan-Asian supremacy, culminating in its ruthless militarism during the war, was largely the idea of a “philosopher-patriot” who was never prosecuted at the war trials due to his presumed insanity. The psychiatrist who examined Okawa Shumei in 1946 was the medical officer Daniel Jaffe, the grandfather of the author of this probing work of research. With his familial insight into his grandfather’s own troubled childhood and adolescence with an often hospitalized mother and his cachet that invited the Japanese to speak freely about Okawa with him, Jaffe had access to dark secrets long hidden. Jaffe’s grandfather was a brilliant, taciturn doctor who did not elaborate about his report on Okawa’s condition at the trial, when he caused a spectacle by slapping Gen. Tojo Hideki’s bald head and otherwise acting up; the author hoped to find some confirmation of his grandfather’s diagnosis that Okawa was “unable to distinguish right from wrong” at the time of the trial. Jaffe delves into Okawa’s early association with the Asianist movement, prophesying to Japanese youth about another world war as a means of shaking off the shackles of the West. Okawa gave public talks about the need for resolving the “Manchurian problem” two years before Japan annexed the Chinese provinces in 1931, thus embarking on its militaristic track to world war. While Okawa served as the Japanese military’s “brain trust,” Daniel Jaffe cut his teeth as a combat psychiatrist, tending to shellshocked young soldiers. His experience as a neuropsychiatrist allowed him to recognize Okawa’s symptoms as “tertiary syphilis.” War criminal or hero? Jaffe reads carefully between the lines to get at the truth.
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1205-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
HISTORY | PSYCHOLOGY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
