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A BORROWED PLACE

THE HISTORY OF HONG KONG

Scholarly, understated, massive history of the Crown Colony, from Britisher and former international banker Welsh. Hong Kong has been a source of embarrassment to both Britain and China from the outset. British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston sacked the envoy who negotiated the island's cession- -and, ever since, the colony has irritated Whitehall with scandals over drugs, prostitution, corruption, and, now, this dreary hand- over business. On China's end, it's the principle of the thing, a scar symbolic of a great wound. Here, Welsh covers events large and small. In 1854, he tells us, Hong Kong Governor Sir John Bowring precipitated a second Anglo-Chinese war, and, through his efforts, China was opened up to European travelers, missionaries, and traders. In 1894, plague struck, causing Governor Sir William Robinson to observe that the Chinese died ``like sheep,'' since they were ``educated to unsanitary habits...accustomed from infancy to herd together''—but Hong Kong survived to see the British accept a 99-year lease in 1898. The 1960's were the golden years of economic freedom, but, even though the populace prospered, hundreds of thousands suffered wretched temporary living conditions—such as sleeping in cardboard boxes near the Star Ferry terminal and even in wire cages at Mongkok. The events of 1972—when Hong Kong's future was decided by Britain and China—are still shrouded in a secrecy that Welsh doesn't dispel, stating only that some feel that if Britain hadn't approached China, China would have let matters lie because Hong Kong was too valuable a trading partner to lose. Welsh doesn't bring history to life so much as recite details, and even the fascinating characters and events that stipple his pages don't add much color. (For a livelier look at the island- colony, see Gerald Segal's The Fate of Hong Kong, p. 921.) (Sixteen pages of b&w illustrations—not seen)

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993

ISBN: 1-56836-002-9

Page Count: 624

Publisher: Kodansha

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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