An insider’s account of the Panama Canal over the last three decades, full of detail and insight.
In his memoir, McMillan (Columns, 2007), a former chairman of the Panama Canal Commission, details the canal’s recent history and its transfer from U.S. to Panamanian control.
McMillan, an American, takes a personal approach to history in this book about the evolution of the Panama Canal, published in concert with the canal’s 2014 centennial. As a member of the canal’s board in the late 1980s and as chairman in the 1990s, McMillan developed a thorough understanding of the canal’s role in both Panamanian politics and in global commerce, which he explains in clear, well-developed prose. Readers unfamiliar with Omar Torrijos, Manuel Noriega and other figures who played a significant role in the canal’s recent history will find plenty of background information to help them follow the changes in government and the implications for the Panama Canal. Much of the narrative focuses on the 1999 transfer of control from the United States to Panama, and McMillan offers persuasive evidence to assure readers that Panama has demonstrated competence in its management of the canal, despite trepidation expressed by many Americans before the transfer. While political concerns, from the 1989 invasion of Panama to the country’s first free elections in 25 years, establish the book’s historical context, McMillan also devotes chapters to the canal’s commercial implications, explaining how the current effort to increase the canal’s capacity will have an impact throughout the shipping industry, driving development in both Pacific and Atlantic ports that can accommodate the larger ships that will be able to travel from one ocean to the other. In many cases, statistics provide evidence of the canal’s continuing importance in global commerce. At times, McMillan’s American triumphalist tone can be grating, as when he criticizes a Panamanian official for choosing to speak in Spanish: “I personally found Foreign Minister [Julio] Linares just plain inconsiderate. He refused to speak any English at a dinner party I once attended—in spite of his ability to speak the language fluently.” But even readers who would prefer a more skeptical approach to the history of U.S. interference in Panamanian affairs will find no fault with McMillan’s accuracy, attention to detail or the unique perspective he provides on a lesser-known moment in history.
An insider’s account of the Panama Canal over the last three decades, full of detail and insight.Pub Date: May 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491051252
Page Count: 144
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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