Without judgment, the author/driver allows his subjects to narrate their own adventures, leading to honest, raw, human...
A longtime NPR reporter who has lived and worked in China for more than a decade offers an engaging account of how ordinary Chinese are navigating the complex changes and challenges in their evolving nation.
In an ingenious experiment to interview people in a relaxed, private manner, Langfitt, a former taxi driver in Philadelphia who is now the London correspondent for NPR, offered free cab rides in Shanghai in exchange for conversation. Since roof lights were not permitted, the author festooned his car with magnetic signs (“Make Shanghai friends, Chat about Shanghai life”). Most people seemed delighted at the free ride and opened up to the Mandarin-speaking foreigner. His passengers included Rocky, “a farm boy turned Shanghai lawyer,” and Charles, a salesman who went on to work for a European newspaper. During road trips, the talk often turned political, and his passengers revealed their thoughts about the state of the roads, Chairman Mao, and the corruption built into the communist system. The tales of Rocky and Charles resurface throughout the work, and in each chapter, Langfitt offers examples of those searching for what Xi Jinping calls the “Chinese Dream.” There’s Joanna, a human rights lawyer who was once imprisoned in a public park; Crystal, a Chinese immigrant in America whose sister had disappeared in the mountains of Southwest China and who urged Langfitt to help in the search; and Ashley, a young professional who grew up in a family of party officials but moved to America “in search of political freedom months before the election of Donald Trump.” All are in search of individual wealth and freedom, now championed by China in a new era in which the country is asserting itself in the world yet still leaving people behind. Lively, humorous, and touching, the book exposes the struggles of regular people in conflict with an authoritarian state.
Without judgment, the author/driver allows his subjects to narrate their own adventures, leading to honest, raw, human stories.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-814-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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