Compelling revisionist history of Chinese foreign relations. Waley-Cohen (History/New York Univ.; Exile in Mid-Qing China, 1991) is mainly concerned here with dispelling certain myths about Chinese attitudes and actions toward the rest of the world. China has been viewed as rabidly isolationist, virulently hostile to and ignorant of the world outside its borders, and irrationally resistant to change and innovation. All of these views, argues Waley-Cohen, are wrong, and stem from the peculiar perceptions of 19th century Western colonizers whose imprecations China quite naturally resisted. The author provides much historical evidence to back up her claims. As early as 200 b.c., China had established networks of trade throughout all of Asia, and later was to extend these ties to Europe and the New World. Foreign ideas and innovations were not as a rule shunned but welcomed. Buddhism, imported from India, became highly influential; foreign inventions, such as the sextant (hence the title of the book) and other astronomical instruments introduced in the 17th century, were enthusiastically adopted. What emerges from the author’s historical account is hardly the image of a benighted backward nation. But perception is often everything. China has indeed at times been hostile to foreign influences, yet the author shows this has often been for good reasons. Jesuit missionaries in the 16th century eventually met with official and popular resistance, yet Jesuit insistence on the exclusivity of Christianity ran counter to China’s traditionally tolerant and eclectic attitude toward religions. China did indeed attempt to restrict trade with the West in the 18th and 19th centuries, not out of ignorance, however, but from understanding all too well the imperial designs of the West. In modern times, China under communism has often been extremely hostile to the West, especially to the US, yet the US for its part reviled China, until very recently, as a criminal and outlaw regime. A provocative, original, and accessible study that may cause readers to reexamine long-held assumptions about China.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04693-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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 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
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
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
