Expert analysis of evolving US/Asia economic and cultural realities, by Gibney (Asian Editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; Miracle by Design, 1982, etc.). Gibney's subject is the Asian renaissance that, he says, is at the heart of America's current economic crisis. Proceeding through Asia country by country, often drawing on personal experience, he creates a clear sense of how things got the way they are. Though focusing primarily on modern history, Gibney incorporates historical incidents involving such figures as Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (whose broadness of vision earned him respect in China but got him defrocked in Rome) and the legendary Sir Stanford Raffles, creator of modern Singapore. The author discusses such diverse elements of Asian culture as the significance of recent Japanese literature; the role of Confucianism in China; the ``Meiji revolution'' of the 19th century (which uncannily presaged Japan's current industrial success); and the thinking of national figures like new-look Communist Deng Xiopeng (``White cat, black cat, who cares as long as it kills rats,'' Deng is quoted as saying). Trade and trade-related conflicts are at the center of Gibney's analysis, and the author can be pointedly unprejudiced about them. Writing of the opium trade, for instance, he notes that, as an example of a foreign power (the opium trade involved leading American families, he says) introducing drugs into a foreign land (China), it ``strikingly foreshadowed the quandaries of the Reagan and Bush administrations'' regarding drug importation from Asia and South America. Most importantly, says Gibney, we have seen only the beginning of Asian influence; soon, our trade with Asia will be double that of our trade with Europe. A strong antidote to ethnic scapegoating and quick-fix thinking about trade imbalances.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-684-19349-3
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
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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