by J.A.G. Roberts ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1999
China specialist Roberts (Modern China: An Illustrated History, not reviewed, etc.) begins with the discovery of the remains of homo erectus nearly a half-million years old, proceeds through dynasties, uprisings, and revolutions, and ends with the Yangzi floods of 1998. Roberts has set himself a daunting task: how to cover thousands of years of history in only a few hundred pages? Since only swift, broad strokes will do in such a endeavor, Roberts elects to focus on politics and economics (at the expense of, say, art and literature and science), to organize by dynasties (because, he says, it is “the organizational principle which is most accessible to the reader”), and to provide a substantial bibliography for the curious and the committed. Along the way he provides both fascinating detail and clear explanations of some of the best-known aspects of Chinese history. An early creation legend, for example, tells that “human beings had their origin in the parasites on the body of the creator, Pangu.— The Chinese initiated civil service exams in the late sixth century. They issued promissory notes, the ancestors of paper money, in the tenth. In the realm of the familiar, Roberts discusses the difference between yin and yang, the rise of Buddhism, the adventures of Genghis Khan and Marco Polo (yes, he actually was in China), the origin of foot-binding, the Great Wall, the Manchu hairstyle (head partially shaved, long braid, or “queue,” in the back), the Dalai Lama, the Boxer Uprising, the rise of Chairman Mao, the Red Guards, Nixon in China, the 1989 massacre near Tiananmen Square. Readers may have difficulty with the pinyin spelling Roberts employs. Although it’s now the “official system of romanization,— some adjustment is required to see “Xianggang” and think “Hong Kong.” A clear trail into a vast, lovely, alluring land. (10 maps)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-674-00074-9
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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