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 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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