Convincing arguments by a thoughtful, cool-headed China expert.
A readable, balanced approach, situated between the pessimists and the optimists, to determining the answer to a crucial question: is China poised to take over the world?
The short answer is no, according to eminent China expert Christensen (Director, China and the New World Program/Princeton Univ.; Worse Than a Monolith: Alliance Politics and Problems of Coercive Diplomacy in Asia, 2011, etc.). In this well-honed study, which skillfully steers between the author’s reasoned argument and opposing views by equally accredited experts (e.g., Martin Jacques, Arvind Subramanian, David Shambaugh), Christensen acknowledges the “real” rise in China’s wealth, diplomatic influence, and military power since 1978. However, he emphasizes the factors keeping China behind American supremacy for the foreseeable future—namely, relative military weakness, economic structural problems, lack of innovation and independent academic research institutions, corruption, and the strength of the U.S.–Asian alliance network created after World War II. Christensen first explores a historical consideration: why the precipitous rise of China will not destabilize the world in the same dangerous fashion as the rise of modern Germany or Japan—because globalization has rendered economies more tightknit (China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001) and because invasion and territorial expansion are no longer in countries’ best interests. (The author does look carefully at the disputed South and East China Sea territorial claims, troublesome strategic hotspots.) Yet in order to embrace its stature as the world’s largest economy—necessary for stability and world order—China has to step up in terms of global investment, peacekeeping, and humanitarian aid. In the second part of his useful study, Christensen sifts through Chinese behavior in each of these facets since 1991. While Chinese leadership values stability above all, it can no longer “hide its brightness” and get a pass on environmental pollution and aiding outlaw regimes in North Korea and Iran.
Convincing arguments by a thoughtful, cool-headed China expert.Pub Date: June 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-08113-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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