Absorbing perspectives on what drove the messianic leader of the Taiping uprising that convulsed China during the mid-19th century. Drawing on contemporary texts, noted Yale sinologist Spence (Chinese Roundabout, 1992, etc.) provides a nuanced account of the spiritual life of Hong Xiuquan, a convert to Christianity whose vivid fantasies or visions doomed him to become a crucifer of blood. A native of rural Hua, Hong came to Canton in 1836 at age 22 to sit for civil-service examinations but failed the tests that could have made him a career bureaucrat. In the provincial capital, however, he was exposed to the evangelical doctrines preached by dedicated Christian missionaries from Europe and the US. Convinced by dreams that he was the younger brother of Jesus, whose duty was to establish a Heavenly Kingdom (Taiping) on earth, Hong eventually attracted a considerable following. Aided by widespread discontent with the Manchu regime that erupted after the Opium War, his movement became a religious and military force to be reckoned with. Having flooded into the eastern reaches of the Yangtze River Valley, the so-called God-worshippers seized Nanjing in 1853. Secure in this waterside stronghold, the insurgents built their New Jerusalem, bowdlerized the Old Testament (mainly to give Jesus a less reproachable lineage), and threatened to overrun all of South China. Concerned for the security of their Shanghai trading concessions, Western powers (notably, the UK) backed the central government, which recaptured Nanjing in 1864. Hong died of natural causes weeks before the final defeat, leaving bitter memories of a celestial state that cost millions their lives during its 11-year duration. With a storyteller's flair that other scholars can only envy, Spence provides lucid context for a remarkable but unfamiliar chapter in Chinese and world history. (maps and illustrations, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03844-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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