A detailed narrative and assessment of India’s 50-year debate over nuclear weapons development. In May 1998 India joined the ranks of the world’s nuclear powers when it detonated five atomic weapons. In this penetrating and extremely well-researched and -documented study, Perkovich, Director of the Secure World Program of the W. Alton Jones Foundation, analyzes the complex and conflicting domestic interests and viewpoints that continue to fuel India’s nuclear debate. While the Western-oriented “Realist” school maintains that states act purely in their national interest and defense in an anarchic international setting, Perkovich dissents, claiming this assumption ignores the specifics of India’s case. Why did it act when it did, why not sooner? Most of India’s history has been typified by nuclear restraint, however labored. On the one hand, India has striven to be a stronger moral force than the West and the former communist world have been. Thus it long resisted the testing of nuclear weapons. On the other hand, India has pursued a quest to join the superpowers— ranks. If superpowers have nuclear weapons, then India should have nuclear weapons. These contradictory poles have determined India’s nuclear policy. Pressured by an influential domestic scientific community and often incensed by the West’s arrogant demands for non-proliferation in the developing world while maintaining its own arsenal, India’s leaders from Nehru on, each of them ambivalent about nuclear weaponry, have allowed research but never actual testing—until May 1998. Perkovich takes the reader inside this long history, revealing personalities, institutions, events, and processes generally little known in the West but vital to understanding India’s nuclear policy. He arrives at conclusions that are often startling and controversial—like his suggestion that India’s democracy may have been a stumbling block to nuclear restraint. An excellent study, showing a subtle and balanced understanding of the nuclear predicament of both India and of the developing world in general. (23 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-520-21772-1
Page Count: 673
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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 Yorkerstaff 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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