by Oliver August ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 18, 2007
A splendid debut.
The London Times’ former Beijing correspondent relates his growing obsession with the case of an enormously wealthy criminal whose whereabouts keenly interested the Chinese authorities.
August began to hear the name of Lai Changxing almost immediately upon his arrival in 1999; less than three months later, Lai vanished after being accused of smuggling $6.4 billion in goods and evading $3.6 billion in taxes. Though he had neither traveled in the country nor studied its languages, the 27-year-old reporter quickly concluded that in some fundamental ways Lai’s odyssey was also the story of modern China. When August was not working on newspaper assignments, he pursued Lai in every way. He hung out in a dance club once frequented by the free-spender and befriended the teenaged dancers who performed there. (How writers must suffer for their craft!) He maintained a residence in Xiamen, once the center of Lai’s power. He cultivated relationships with government officials, journalists, students and businessmen. He visited the birth village of his quarry. He learned Mandarin, read everything he could and surfed the Internet, where Lai’s case had engendered breathless, often factitious speculation. He located and managed an informal tour of the Red Mansion, the abandoned residence (now a museum) where Lai had once wined, dined and concubined his clients and government officials. At various times, the Chinese authorities became very interested in the author’s movements, and he endured a number of “interviews” with ominous, unsmiling bureaucrats. Eventually, Lai turned up in Vancouver, where he sought and, after protracted procedures, received asylum. The author flew to Canada to watch the public hearing and—no surprise by now—to worm his way into a couple of face-to-face encounters with Lai. August artfully delays the powerful denouement until the last dozen words.
A splendid debut.Pub Date: July 18, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-618-71498-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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