Nuanced reporting on a tradition-bound society struggling to find its way in the 21st century.
An incisive, well-written account of Japan’s recent social and economic malaise, including a frightening portrait of the nation’s hikikomori: disaffected youths who lock themselves in their rooms for months or years at a time as a way of coping with life in a society that denies them self-expression.
Visiting scholar at Berkeley’s Institute of East Asian Studies, Zielenziger was puzzled by Japan’s seeming inability to recover from its economic slump when he began his seven-year stint as Tokyo bureau chief for Knight Ridder in 1996. Then he met some of the more than one million socially withdrawn hikikomori. Mainly men, often bright and creative, they include Kenji, 34, who reads, watches TV, daydreams and rarely leaves his room in his mother’s tiny apartment; and anxious, angry Jun, 28, who barricades himself from his parents, sleeps late into the afternoon and bikes frantically through downtown streets after dark. Unlike western youths who still live at home or act antisocially, Japan’s disenchanted suffer from a “social disorder” unique to a nation in spiritual crisis, declares the author. Drawing on interviews with young people, parents and psychiatrists, Zielenziger finds in these frustrated young people a way of understanding a change-resistant nation in which “obedience and group harmony,” though they served Japan well in the past, are now stifling the creativity and innovation needed to regain a place in the complex global economy. He goes on to describe other behaviors, from increases in binge-drinking and group suicides to the refusal of many young women to marry and have children, that he says also reflect the nation’s inability to imagine a future. “Japanese today do not know who they are,” one writer tells Zielenziger. “If asked to identify themselves, they can only give a job title or company name.” The country would rather withdraw than transform itself, he concludes.
Nuanced reporting on a tradition-bound society struggling to find its way in the 21st century.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51303-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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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