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
A compelling argument that over its history the South changed from a polyglot society into two homogeneous ones divided by race, but that in recent decades the region has been rapidly acquiring a new ethnic diversity. Tindall (History/Univ. of North Carolina; America, 1984) develops this thesis in three short pieces drawn from his 1992 Averitt lectures at Georgia Southern University. In the first, ``Natives and Newcomers,'' Tindall gives an overview of the surprisingly diverse social composition of the South from the time of the first European settlers through modern times. The pervasive presence of African-Americans and Indians, Scotch-Irish settlers, English colonists, Louisiana Cajuns, and German Protestants seeking religious freedom gave the 18th-century South, in Tindall's view, ``the most polyglot population in the English colonies.'' After the Revolution, Indians were expelled from the Southeastern states and far fewer new immigrants settled in the South than in the North. In ``Ethnic Southerners,'' Tindall traces the growth of a distinctive southern ethnicity from the colonial period to the 20th century. The regional identity of southern people, he asserts, grew both out of the ethnic traditions they brought with them and out of perceived contrasts with other regions of the country in lifestyle, custom, and outlook. In ``Southern Ethnics,'' Tindall looks at the modern phenomenon of foreign immigration to the South. He points out that, in recent decades, more people have moved into the region than have moved out: from Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the northern states. Tindall anticipates that the nativism, xenophobia, and political tension that met earlier waves of immigration to the US may occur in the modern South, but that the diverse cultures of the new southern ethnics will ultimately enrich their region. Tindall eruditely shatters stereotypes about the South, drawing a picture of a region that is at once distinctive and much like the rest of the US in its diversity.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-8203-1655-5
Page Count: 79
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
Though uncritical in his admiration for British arms, Allen provides a rousing and informative yarn that will appeal to fans...
Unsung heroes of the Raj get treated to an extended fanfare.
In the mid-19th century, the British army dispatched a corps of soldiers to the Punjab, India’s far northwestern frontier, to fight the feared “Pathans” and other enemies of the empire’s progress. The majority of their officers were young men scarcely in their 20s whose bravery under fire became the stuff of legend. Focusing on half-a-dozen or so of these junior leaders, Allen (who is descended from John Nicholson, the youngest of the lot) offers an approving view of their work as they battle mustachioed brigands and revolutionary firebrands—such as Shahwali Khan (the feared Jafir of the Dagger Hand) and Jehandad Khan of the Tanoli (whose men were “brave and hardy and accounted the best swordsmen in Huzara”). Although young, the British officers assumed positions of great responsibility, challenging for men with much more experience; a 25-year-old named Harry Lumsden, for instance, commanded a force of 3,500 Sikh fighters, while a 29-year-old named Herbert Edwardes led an even larger army of Afghans into combat. Allen attributes these young men’s willingness to fight and die on the distant frontiers of empire to patriotism and religious fervor (“We have to make a leap of imagination from our own faithless age,” he sniffs, “back to an era when the promise of the Heavenly Kingdom for those who had fought the good fight was still very real”), overlooking the possibilities for profit and advancement that followed a pitched battle—to say nothing of thrill-seeking and other less exalted motives for serving the crown.
Though uncritical in his admiration for British arms, Allen provides a rousing and informative yarn that will appeal to fans of Lives of the Bengal Lancers and Gunga Din.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0861-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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