``How was it possible,'' the husband-and-wife Harrieses ask about the Imperial Japanese Army, ``for an organization displaying the highest of soldierly qualities to possess such a capacity for barbarism?'' In this nicely researched, compelling history of the Imperial Japanese Army from its inception during the Meiji Restoration to its dissolution in 1945, the authors (Sheathing the Sword, 1987, etc.) answer that question well. At the core of the paradox lies the code of bushido, the ancient ethos of the samurai that, according to the authors, was perverted by modernizers of the Japanese military into a philosophy that exalted death and violence and taught contempt for the vanquished. These alterations, the Harrieses says, ``did indeed contribute to war crimes.'' The development of the Imperial Japanese Army evidently was also pervasively influenced by the military institutions of Europe (particularly Germany), and, in emulating the armies of Europe, the Japanese distilled much of the best of both the samurai and the European traditions while developing a fighting force that could compete successfully with those of the Great Powers. Once it emerged from international isolation, the authors explain, Japan began to imitate Europe's imperialism as well as its militarism. Detailing Japan's intrigues against China and Russia and its successes in the first Sino- Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, as well as its successful though peripheral involvement in WW I, the Harrieses show how the island nation's warlords developed a hubris that led inexorably to Japan's imperialist adventures on the Asian mainland and war with America. The authors go on to tell the story of the atrocities of the WW II Japanese forces and the collapse of Japan's martial tradition in the wake of defeat, and assess the modest role of the military in postwar Japanese life and policy. A fine history that analyzes the military legacy of the Imperial Japanese Army and assesses moral responsibility for its excesses. (Sixteen pages of b&w illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-56935-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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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