A triumph of explanatory reporting about foreign policy.
A knowledgeable chronicle of U.S.–North Korean negotiations during the Clinton and Bush White House years.
Chinoy (China Live, 1997, etc.) formerly covered North and South Korea for CNN and now studies them from afar as a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy. He shows that Kim Jong-Il is indeed a dictator who continues the repressive policies of his father. Unlike many other journalists and foreign-policy analysts, however, Chinoy analyzes U.S. and South Korean policymakers just as closely as the North Koreans, with China, Japan and other nations also figuring in the mix. This provides welcome context for North Korea’s development of a nuclear arsenal. If Kim Jong-Il comes across as a villain driving an “Axis of Evil” nation, current President Bush is painted in colors just as dark. In scene after scene, meticulously sourced by Chinoy (though some of those sources insisted on and received anonymity), Bush and his chief foreign-policy advisors come across as ideologues at best, fools squandering an opportunity for nuclear disarmament at worst. The author does not appear to be a shrill, knee-jerk Bush administration critic, but a journalist taking the story where the facts have led him. The irony is that the Bush administration built its foreign policy around the desire to prevent countries like North Korea from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, but failed in part because of its inability to negotiate effectively. Chinoy’s depiction of the visceral, personal hostility Bush developed for Kim Jong-Il is especially disturbing, because he shows a U.S. president making decisions based on emotion instead of reason. The only caveat to make about this splendid book is that its detail is so immense, the back and forth of diplomacy that it describes so lacking in rationality, that the narrative occasionally becomes overwhelming.
A triumph of explanatory reporting about foreign policy.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37153-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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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