A timely, reasoned treatise by a keen observer and historian.
A pertinent study of the relationship between the United States and China, in which “a rapidly ascending China [is] challeng[ing] America’s accustomed predominance.”
Using as point of departure the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’ explanation for the start of the Peloponnesian War (“It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable”), Allison (Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World, 2012, etc.), the director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, refers to the “natural, inevitable discombobulation that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power”—in this case, China versus the U.S. First, the author establishes what China and its ambitious president, Xi Jinping, are after—namely, using geoeconomic strength and manipulation to become the most powerful nation in the world. Indeed, Allison informs his surprised students, China has already surpassed the U.S. as the “manufacturing powerhouse of the world” and also in other areas such as infrastructure, military spending, and investments in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. China uses incrementally deployed instruments of “soft power” to establish mastery over its trading partners, employing nicely Sun Tzu’s dictum from The Art of War that “the highest victory is to defeat the enemy without ever fighting.” Relying on the work of the Thucydides Project Harvard, Allison draws on numerous examples over the last 500 years of the violent clashes between upstarts and established powers—e.g., the imperial ambitions of the U.S. under Theodore Roosevelt in challenging Spain at the turn of the 19th century and the world war sparked by competition between Germany and Britain in 1914. While the author offers numerous examples of how a fatal confrontation could erupt between the U.S. and China (e.g., the move for independence by Taiwan), he closes with a set of calming strategies to defuse tensions.
A timely, reasoned treatise by a keen observer and historian.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-93527-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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