A solid entry point into the lives of a people who have fully earned their place on the world stage.
An exploration of “the cultural emergence and…international awareness and acceptance of South Korean expression to a point of familiarity.”
In this update and extension of his earlier book, The Koreans (1999), Breen (Kim Jong-Il: North Korea's Dear Leader, 2004, etc.), a longtime observer of the country’s rise to global prominence, finds much to love and emulate about people, specifically those in the South. Indeed, his fondness for the Koreans often causes him to excuse some of their less-pleasant traits, such as the tendency, as part of their hierarchical culture, to act rudely toward people they deem inferior. In Breen’s characterization, the South Koreans are as amazed as the rest of the world by their success, since only 40 years prior, the future still looked bleak under their dictatorial government. Only in the 21st century have the Koreans woken up “to their own arrival in the world,” largely thanks to the hard-striving generation of those born between 1920 and 1955, who embraced and contributed to the country’s economic development. In discrete chapters, Breen tackles some of the themes dear and/or onerous to the country, including its defiance in the face of Japanese invasion and North Korean aggression; its proud reforestation projects started in the late 1960s; the stubborn obeisance to authority and need for a leader; massive gentrification; growth of Protestantism; near-universal literacy rate; high suicide rate; and near-lowest birth rate in the world. Along with a deep consideration of the materialistic bent of the worker bees, Breen is rooting for the country’s democratic system, only in place for two decades and living in uneasy compatibility with an independent-minded military. And where once the author was predicting unity of North and South in the Korean peninsula, he now calls rather for “reconciliation” between the two sides, which can only happen, he admits, when the North’s leadership decides to make the change.
A solid entry point into the lives of a people who have fully earned their place on the world stage.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-06505-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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