A direct, hard-hitting study of China’s Great Leap Forward in light of newly opened archival material.
Veteran China historian Dikötter (Humanities/Univ. of Hong Kong, Modern History of China/Univ. of London; The Age of Openness: China Before Mao, 2008, etc.) parses this staggering tragedy into three manageable, comprehensive components: Mao Zedong’s bloody-minded resolve to implement the accelerated collectivization of the countryside, and the stifling of all opposition; the effects of these devastating policies on agriculture, industry, trade, housing and nature; and the catastrophic human toll (“at least 45 million people died unnecessarily between 1958 and 1962”). Vying bombastically with the Soviet Union to overtake the Western imperialistic powers in economic production, Mao was bent on purging opposition and prodding provincial cronies to harness China’s real wealth—its huge labor force—in order to transform the countryside in schemes of rapid, reckless modernization. China was “in the grip of gigantism,” and mass mobilization was needed to fulfill inflated targets for agricultural and industrial output. Communes tried to outdo each other in zeal, and laggards were paraded in front of others to be humiliated and tortured. Deep ploughing and close cropping, supposed “innovative methods,” reaped woeful yields, and the “command economy” forced villagers “to sell grain before their own subsistence needs were met.” Yet critics were cowed into silence, and Mao delivered only glowing reports to the public. Despite trickling news of crop failure, China met foreign-trade commitments by exporting grain. But by 1960, due to “unprecedented natural catastrophes,” they had to adopt a humiliating policy of importing grain from capitalist markets. Meanwhile, people were dying in droves, and Dikötter delivers a scathing litany of abuses visited on the most vulnerable—children, women and the elderly. A horrifically eye-opening work of a dark period of Chinese history that desperately cries out for further examination.
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8027-7768-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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
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