Western readers with a strong devotion to individual liberties may be turned off, but Khanna is thorough and clear, offering...
An India-born, Western-educated strategic adviser and author offers a comprehensive worldview from an Asian perspective.
Now residing in Singapore—“the unofficial capital of Asia, a melting pot that embodies Asia’s potential to make the most of the Europeanization and Americanization of the past and, most importantly, the Asianization of today and tomorrow”—Khanna (Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, 2016, etc.) enlists his considerable global experience and education to elegantly lay out the vast range and enormous potential of what he calls the Asian “system” of moving beyond geography and embracing “alliances, institutions, infrastructure, trade, investment, culture and other patterns.” As such, Asia encompasses China, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam as well as the Gulf states (“West Asia”) and India, Russia, Iran, and, strategically, Australia. Seeing the world from an Asian point of view first entails jettisoning accumulated stereotypes—e.g., that Asia needs the U.S. more than we need Asia. This is not true, and Asian nations have become increasingly wary of Washington’s “unreliable promises.” Khanna begins with a dazzling distillation of the history of the world from an Asian perspective, emphasizing how the main swath of early civilization was situated in Asia and how briefly (though intensively) the Western powers inserted themselves into the picture. The author underscores that “Asia’s linkages have been continually propelled through commerce, conflict, and culture.” Following the historical narrative, Khanna moves into “Asia-nomics,” or how each country is developing its particular economic strength. For example, after the first wave of modern Asian growth in postwar Japan and South Korea, followed by China, the current wave is now propelled by Southeast Asia (India, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia). Then, the author addresses the phenomenal Asian diaspora in America and in Europe; China’s forays into Africa; and how liberal democracy probably does not suit Asian countries as much as the technocratic model ("good despotism") of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore.
Western readers with a strong devotion to individual liberties may be turned off, but Khanna is thorough and clear, offering abundant food for thought.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9626-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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