A cogent and unsettling exploration of one of the key geopolitical issues of our time.
An island nation’s troubled waters.
Of all the flashpoints around the world, Taiwan may be the most dangerous. The author of numerous books on Asia, Brown emphasizes this point in his accessible study. As an example, Brown notes that 381 planes from the Chinese air force entered Taiwan’s air defense zone in 2020. Two years later, that figure jumped to 1,727 planes. Brown outlines the turbulent history of Taiwan, exploring the Japanese occupation from 1895 to 1945, the arrival of the defeated Nationalist forces in 1949, and the slow march to democracy and prosperity since then. The real value of the book, however, is its analysis of the past two decades. China has become increasingly assertive about its claim to Taiwan, while a new generation of Taiwanese people want to move toward full independence. The U.S. sees Taiwan, which is roughly the size of Maryland, as a democratic bastion against a communist superpower. Brown stresses how this is a delicate balancing act for the West, which must find a level of support for Taiwan that will deter China while not provoking Beijing. The Chinese government may believe that it could take and hold Taiwan without great difficulty, but Brown is not so sure. A wrong move could easily draw the U.S. and other powers into a broader conflict. He concludes that the status quo, with Taiwan remaining ambiguously half-independent, might be the only answer. “For today, strenuous defence of the stalemate is all that we can meaningfully do,” he writes. “Anything else is insanity.”
A cogent and unsettling exploration of one of the key geopolitical issues of our time.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250362094
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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 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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