A pointed analysis of a country that, though much in the news, remains a mystery to most outsiders.
Recent developments in a South Asian country that, the author suggests, is unduly shackled by the past.
At the beginning of the 2010s, writes Myint-U (Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia, 2012, etc.), everything seemed to be looking up for his nation: An entrenched military government was giving up power to a civilian one, and “everybody, at least in the West, began to believe that the country was in the midst of an astonishing transformation.” Alas, Burma, endowed with some of the planet’s greatest biodiversity, is also riven by ethnic tensions and politics colored by money, much of it from the trade in opium-based drugs. In Burmese thought, writes the author, “kala” has an important role—that is, a notion of overarching ethnicity that sharply separates people into clans, tribes, groups of others. Colonizing powers reinforced this division. As the author notes, during World II, Japan backed the Arakanese Buddhists while the British armed the Muslims who are now in the headlines as the Rohingya. These groups continue to clash, with recent ethnic violence forcing untold hundreds of thousands of Burmese Muslims to take refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. The world found much hope in the freeing of former political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi, who became a member of parliament and then president. However, writes the author, she has since practiced politics pretty much as usual, seeking a reconciliation between her party and the all-powerful military and emphasizing “at every opportunity that she loved the army…and that she wanted more than anything to see it stronger and more respected than ever.” The conflict rages on, not just internally, but also with an encroaching China. So does economic anxiety, as the government “advocated liberalization and a welcoming of foreign investment" but refused to abandon cronyism and bureaucratic micromanagement. The author calls Burma an “unfinished nation,” and the description seems apt.
A pointed analysis of a country that, though much in the news, remains a mystery to most outsiders.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-324-00329-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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