A compelling and well-detailed biography of Kang Sheng, Mao's sadistic, Machiavellian head of secret police. Byron (a pseudonymous ``veteran Western diplomat'') and Pack (coauthor, Speaking Out, 1988; Edward Bennett Williams for the Defense, 1985, etc.) exaggerate less than you might think in claiming that ``next to Kang Sheng, Mao himself seems to shrink in importance and interest.'' Convincingly comparing Kang to Beria, head of the Soviet secret police under Stalin, the authors show how Kang rose from obscure roots in feudal Chinese society to become the mastermind of the Communist police state and the ``bad cop'' of the terrifying Cultural Revolution. Kang entered Chinese politics as a renegade revolutionary living the secret life of a Communist in Shanghai under the Kuomintang. Shrewdly riding coattails into the Party's inner circles, he soon took over the Chinese Communist secret police, travelling to Moscow (a ``finishing school for sadists'') to learn from Stalin's purges gruesome techniques for liquidating opposition to Communism. After the 1949 Revolution, Kang's ascent continued via a calculated flattering of Mao's egomania—and the execution of hundreds of thousands of Chinese. All the while, private passions and eccentricities such as opium smoking, manic-depression, and expert ambidextrous calligraphy made him a bizarre, shadowy player in Mao's inner circle—one who helped orchestrate such calamities as the Hundred Flowers Movement, the suppressions of the Cultural Revolution, and the purging of Deng Xiaoping. Kang's reputation lasted until shortly after his 1975 death, when his secret conspiracy with the hated Gang of Four was made public. In 1980, he was expelled posthumously from the Party. Despite occasional repetition and much melodrama, a mesmerizing peek into China's veiled backstage politics. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs; map—not seen.)
Pub Date: Jan. 27, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-69537-1
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
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 2024 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
