An intelligent, wonderfully written account of life in millennial Asia that, despite its almost quaint goal of painting a...
An entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking tour of Asia as it prepares for the 21st century.
Husband and wife Kristof and WuDunn (China Wakes, 1994) provide a panoramic view of Asia on the verge of dramatic social and economic change. The impetus for the book is the Asian economic crisis, which, the authors argue, was actually a blessing in disguise, in that it cleared out a lot of the dead wood—totalitarianism, cronyism, and corruption—that threatened to stall Asia's continued "rise." In trying to explain the crisis, Kristof and WuDunn come around to the view that the past 500 years of Western dominance represent a historical anomaly, and they assert that in the near future Asian nations will regain a dominant role in world affairs. This thesis is not particularly original, of course, nor does the book break any scholarly ground (or even survey the existing literature in any great depth). But Kristof and WuDunn are excellent journalists, and they are at their best when presenting anecdotes and images that convey larger truths in compelling and often touching ways. Thus, their analysis of Japan and China (countries where they have lived and where they speak the language) is especially thoughtful and nuanced; their accounts of life in Indonesia and Thailand are also written with confidence. The book's major flaw, however, is its treatment of India. It is unclear why India should be analyzed with East Asia at all—Iran, Central Asia, and Nepal are not touched upon—and the portions of the book devoted to it have a sketchy, added-on quality that is exacerbated by a condescension that verges on distaste (the country is described several times as "neurotic").
An intelligent, wonderfully written account of life in millennial Asia that, despite its almost quaint goal of painting a portrait of a continent, works best when it simply tells the stories of people whom the authors have come to know.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40325-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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