Sturdy, scholarly, sharply focused, closely reasoned.
The tattered history of the notion that free, international trade ensures the permanence of peace and the disappearance of war.
Macdonald—a former investment banker, now an author (A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy, 2003)—returns with a two-century history, noting how, continually, events and violence have shattered the notion that trade will bring peace among nations. He begins in the 19th century and describes Pax Britannica, a time, he writes, when “it all seemed so simple.” But history is not static, and France began its steady return to power after Waterloo while the United States, following the Civil War, began its own journey to the pinnacle of world power. Macdonald then devotes chapters to our major wars (world wars I and II) and shows how and why the trade-peace theory just did not obtain. He focuses on economic factors throughout: the hunger for coal, the thirst for petroleum, the passion for raw materials. He revisits the post–World War I failures of Versailles (France wanted Germany’s resources; Germany wanted them back) and Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II—a move that, had it been successful (as it nearly was), would have considerably altered subsequent world history. The second half of the text deals with Pax Americana: how the United States achieved it, how it has attempted to administer it and how current events are fracturing it. The author concludes with accounts of the rises (and increasing sways) of India and China and the enduring contention and concern in the region about access to the Strait of Malacca and the control of key Pacific islands. Macdonald concludes with an eight-point list of factors in the more-or-less enduring post–World War II peace among the world’s powers. He does not believe America can afford a new isolationism.
Sturdy, scholarly, sharply focused, closely reasoned.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-22963-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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
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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