Useful for students of geopolitics, international economics, and demography alike.
The world is changing, dramatically and in large part because of shifts in population.
University of London demographer Morland (Demographic Engineering: Population Strategies in Ethnic Conflict, 2014) considers population dynamics as a driving force in historical change—not just at the macro level, but in the lives of individuals. As he notes, only a few generations have passed since 1-in-6 British children died before their first birthdays, whereas “today, just over a century later, only one child in three hundred born in England does not reach the age of one.” At the same time, sub-Saharan African nations whose birth rates had once leveled off have grown in population but not in economic opportunity, propelling a wave of migrants northward to a Europe whose Indigenous populations have been steadily shrinking—in Italy, for example, by a projected 20 percent by the end of the century. This reiterates a historical trend in which exploding European populations led to migrations to the Americas and Australia, and even if European and European-descended—and especially British—peoples remain politically and economically more powerful than the rest of the world, “they have significantly retreated as an ethnic group within their own states.” Other nations have experienced patterns of growth and decline: Japan, for instance, whose population is rapidly falling, and Russia, which had a comparatively huge population in late czarist times but became the first state in the world to legalize abortion in the Soviet era—only to retract it in 1935, when “Stalin declared ‘man the most precious resource.’ ” Today, Putin’s Russia faces a decline in ethnic Russians. Demography is not necessarily destiny, but the trends Morland identifies are suggestive of broad political changes to come, including the prospect that a grayer world may also mean a greener one: “Where human population starts to decline, from Japan to Bulgaria, nature moves fast into the void.”
Useful for students of geopolitics, international economics, and demography alike.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5417-8836-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
