A fresh perspective mainly for students and specialists.
Street-level view of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
Cunningham (Media Studies/Doshisha Univ., Kyoto), an American-born Asia specialist, was living on campus at Beijing Normal University during the weeks-long popular uprising that ended with the deaths of hundreds of Chinese students and intellectuals on June 4. The historic and bloody event—still the object of a “soul-chilling silence” by Chinese officials—has been much written about in the West, but Cunningham offers the intriguing point of view of a Chinese speaker who both took part in the demonstrations and covered them as a freelance journalist for the BBC. His vivid, highly personal account begins in early May, when he joined Chinese students in orderly sit-ins at the New China News Agency to protest the lack of press freedom. Amid campus rivalries, the uprising grew to include a bicycle demonstration, slogan-shouting in front of the People’s Daily offices and a mid-May hunger strike that gave new urgency to the protest. Cunningham re-creates the headiness of the time and the hopefulness of young Chinese wearing headbands and carrying red flags and hand-painted posters. His many extended conversations with student leaders and others reveal the frequent mistrust among the demonstrators as well as their shared grievances over corruption and class privilege in Chinese society. As the war of nerves between protesters and government officials heated up, Cunningham experienced his own inner turmoil as a Westerner who was highly sympathetic to the uprising but nonetheless viewed with suspicion by many in the crowd. He concludes with an account of the violent government crackdown. The author says the upheaval at Tiananmen accelerated reform, and he remains in awe of the “remarkably peaceful, transformative, and uplifting weeks” that preceded the arrival of troops and tanks. His inside view of these chaotic days offers a deeper understanding of the yearning for freedom that drove youths and workers into the streets of a closed society.
A fresh perspective mainly for students and specialists.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7425-6672-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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 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
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 2023 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.
bookshelf
