A quiet, scholarly, but devastating study of Tibet from the earliest times to the present. While there is useful material on the ethnic origins of the Tibetans and their early history, Smith, an independent scholar of international relations, gives three-quarters of his space to the history of the country since 1903, when a British military expedition in search of trade privileges focused attention on the country for the first time. It ended Tibet's isolation, and made it clear that China's claim of authority was a myth. A failed attempt by China in 1911 to establish its authority contributed to its own financial collapse. In 1950, the Chinese Communists invaded the country, almost at the same time they entered the Korean War. The international reaction to the invasion and to massive human-rights violations in Tibet has been constrained by the recognition by most major governments of Chinese sovereignty and by their desire to preserve their relations with the Chinese government. Thus, it was not until the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that a US president (George Bush) agreed to meet him. And yet the evidence of genocide is abundant: Even the Panchen Lama, an ally of the Chinese government, estimated that 10 to 15 percent of the population had been imprisoned, and the other credible estimates are that as much as 20 percent of the population may have been executed, starved to death, or otherwise eliminated. For a while, conditions in Tibet horrified even the Chinese leadership, but the liberalization evident at least in economic affairs in China has not been reflected in Tibet. In summary, Smith calls Chinese rule ``illegitimate, oppressive, destructive, barbaric, and a form of state feudalism that has turned all Tibetans into serfs of the Chinese state.'' His conclusion is the more impressive for the care and comprehensiveness with which Smith has assembled the evidence. A monumental study that provides scholarship, insight, and controlled passion.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8133-3155-2
Page Count: 780
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
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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