An evenhanded, accessible, and pertinent work of Asian history and current affairs.
A British journalist's tenacious, on-the-ground reporting of the continued "sibling rivalry" among the three major East Asian economies, who "ought to be the firmest of allies."
Booth, long fascinated by the region, intriguingly compares the long-simmering resentment among China, Korea, and Japan to an ongoing family feud. Looking at the arrival of Matthew Galbraith Perry’s ships in Tokyo in 1853, the author writes, “China had been the Middle Kingdom, font of all knowledge, technology, and civilization; Korea was the primary tributary land, the middle sibling, and Japan the vaguely barbaric little brother, but the trauma of the [ships’] arrival lit the fuse for a quasi-revolution in Japan,” which ultimately led “to a catastrophic attempt to build an empire based on the Western model.” Via a systematic journey through these countries (first Japan, then China, then Korea), the author, employing a jocular, tongue-in-cheek, nondidactic tone, underscores how the bad blood—both popular feeling and political leaning—customarily emanates from Japan's strong-arm tactics and perceived lack of reckoning toward the other two brothers. As Booth points out, the hundreds of thousands of Koreans living in Japan after World War II, descendants of Japan's shameful annexation of Korea between 1910 and 1945, "faced heavy discrimination in the postwar employment market,” and they still endure stiff biases regarding citizenship and identity. In addition to land disputes, the unresolved wounds of the Chinese and Korean “comfort women”—enslaved by the Japanese military during WWII—continue to rankle relations. Chronicling his visits to museums and shrines in all three countries, the author gives an excellent sense of how each views itself in relation to the others—through what they teach (or fail to teach) to their own people. Booth’s simple yet ingenious thesis encapsulates so much of what is still going wrong there, with an ancient rivalry not likely to be resolved soon.
An evenhanded, accessible, and pertinent work of Asian history and current affairs.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-11406-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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 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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