A well-told, panoramic international true-crime adventure.
Expanding on his intriguing New Yorker article, Keefe (Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping, 2005) tells the story of a multimillion-dollar smuggling ring that ferried illegal immigrants from China to New York City in the 1980s and early ’90s.
The ringleader, or “snakehead,” was a legal immigrant named Cheng Chui Ping, known to everyone in her Chinatown neighborhood as “Sister Ping.” Ping ran her operation, one of the largest and most sophisticated of its kind in the world, from a storefront on Chinatown’s Hester Street beginning in 1982. During the next decade, she raked in millions of dollars from poor Chinese desperate to get to America; each paid thousands of dollars to be smuggled in. Ping collaborated with the violent Chinatown gang Fuk Ching, an arrangement that would eventually lead to her downfall. On a June night in 1993, two Fuk Ching members were the victims of a revenge killing by a rival gang—the same day they were supposed to offload a ship of Chinese “customers.” With no one to meet it, the Golden Venture ran aground in Queens; ten people were killed, and many more were injured and arrested by police. In the wake of the tragedy, authorities tracked Ping, but it took years before she was finally captured in Hong Kong in 2000. Keefe ably navigates this extremely complex story, interviewing people at all levels, including law enforcement officials and—via written questions and answers—the imprisoned Sister Ping. Most effective are the author’s interviews with the illegal Chinese immigrants, who explain their willingness to pay a fortune—and risk their lives on a dangerous journey—just for the chance to reach America.
A well-told, panoramic international true-crime adventure.Pub Date: July 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52130-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
The American ``occupation'' of Britain during WW II—the phrase is George Orwell's—could have been a disaster but, in the event, was almost a triumph. As Reynolds (History/Cambridge Univ.; co-author of An Ocean Apart, not reviewed) points out, by D-Day there were 1,650,000 members of the US armed forces on an overcrowded island. The bulk of the 426,000 American airmen were in Norfolk and Suffolk; it was as if 130 air bases had been dropped down in the state of Vermont. GIs received three times the pay of British soldiers. Many of the British men were away, their wives and girlfriends alone, and the US troops rich and available—hence the contemporary clichÇ that the Yanks were ``oversexed, overpaid, overfed, and over here.'' Less familiar, writes Reynolds, was the GIs' riposte, that the British were ``undersexed, underpaid, underfed, and under Eisenhower.'' The Americans also brought with them their own unresolved social problems: Less than five percent of the black soldiers had voted in the previous five years, and for all the concern of Roosevelt and Eisenhower, the armed forces still practiced de facto racial segregation. British and American attitudes to prostitution and venereal disease were very different. The British viewed these not as matters of public health but of personal privacy, into which the state should not venture. To the Americans, a VD rate of 58 cases per 1,000 troops was unacceptable. Despite all these potential sources of serious friction, the British military historian Liddell Hart ``could not `think of any case in history' where relations between occupier and occupied had been so good.'' The credit goes partly to the British themselves, who made significant concessions, partly to the good humor of both peoples, and partly to the example of Eisenhower himself, who in this, as in other matters, appears in retrospect a gifted leader. Reynolds brings good judgment, humor, and a deep knowledge of the United States as well as Britain to bear in this perceptive account of a little noticed aspect of the ``special relationship.''
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-42161-0
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
An insightful biography of a compelling and paradoxical protagonist of modern French culture. In depicting the life and career of Gyp, Silverman (French/Penn State Univ.) illuminates the many contradictions of fin-de-siäcle France. Sibylle-Gabrielle Marie-Antoinette de Riquetti de Mirabeau, comtesse de Martel de Janville, adopted the male nom de plume ``Gyp.'' An extraordinarily prolific writer, she produced, between 1880 and 1930, over 100 novels, 20 plays, hundreds of articles, and four volumes of memoirs. She was the last descendant of the great Revolutionary orator Mirabeau; not without consequence, she was also related to the notorious counter- revolutionary Mirabeau-Tonneau. This contradictory political legacy would eventually coalesce to create what Silverman calls a ``right- wing anarchist.'' Gyp was a fervid nationalist and fanatical defender of the French Right. In 1899, at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, when asked to state her profession, she replied, ``Anti- Semite.'' Her political heroes included Napoleon, General Boulanger, and other champions of the centralized, authoritarian state. Gyp's political contradictions were matched by personal ones. As a woman and the last of the Mirabeau line, she was never allowed to forget that the distinguished family name would die with her. Her officer father, often absent, was killed in an absurd military accident, and her mother was an unloving woman, jealous of her daughter's commercial and social success. In her obsessive desire to obtain power and autonomy, as well as her crusade against the corset and arranged marriages, Gyp was sometimes deemed a feminist, an attribute she vehemently rejected as she created a personal, Manichean myth of female vice and male virtue. But if we allow the oxymoron of a ``right-wing anarchist,'' then we can admit a second conceptual contradiction—Gyp as a ``misogynist feminist.'' Although Silverman's characterization of Gyp as an anarchist is strained, the book is a fascinating examination of fin-de-siäcle France and one of its most provocative figures.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-508754-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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