A biased but informative take on an important aspect of Asian political history.
Heavily detailed history of the movement to liberate Tibet from Chinese rule.
Since the People’s Liberation Army invaded in 1950, and particularly since the Dalai Lama went into exile in 1959, the Tibetan people’s struggle for autonomy has attracted international attention. John B. Roberts, a former aide to President Reagan, and his wife Elizabeth, a freelance journalist, combine archival research and interviews to chronicle that struggle, which burst into the open in 1959 with a CIA-backed uprising that cost some 87,000 Tibetan lives. The authors are candid about the CIA’s covert funding of the movement, which came to an end when the Nixon administration concluded it might derail attempts to forge closer diplomatic ties with China. They also discuss the Dalai Lama’s remarkable life and his status as a spiritual icon, which has prompted many governments, human-rights advocates and celebrities to speak against the Chinese government’s repressive policies. To date there has been little response, and the authors’ frustration over this face is palpable. They toss plenty of advocacy into their hybrid combination of history and biography, taking a highly dramatic tone: “The struggle is not between the Chinese people and the rest of the world. Nor is it between the Chinese people and the Tibetan people, although Chinese government propagandists are more than willing to whip up nationalistic and ethnic tensions to distract from the real issues. The fight is between freedom and dictatorship. For the Tibetan people to win their struggle, the Chinese people will also have to find liberation.” Those willing to ignore this sort of grandstanding will find the authors’ readable text a treasure trove of information about Tibet’s ordeal. They close by suggesting that foreigners supporting Tibetan freedom emulate the anti-apartheid movement by campaigning for trade sanctions and international divestment to put economic pressure on China.
A biased but informative take on an important aspect of Asian political history.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8144-0983-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: AMACOM
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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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