Compulsive globe-spinners won’t find much new in these pages, but Marshall’s broad survey of events in the light of...
Is geography destiny? Perhaps not, but Manifest Destiny certainly had a geographical component—and so, writes former Sky News correspondent Marshall ("Dirty Northern B*st*rds!": And Other Tales from the Terraces: The Story of Britain's Football Chants, 2014, etc.), will a future world in which the United States may not be a superpower.
“When Vladimir Putin isn’t thinking about God, and mountains, he’s thinking about pizza,” writes the author. Pizza and, of course, the Ukraine, his next-door neighbor and a ripe plum for any vision of a Russian empire. Geography has a grim matter-of-factness to it: argue that the Mongols came exploding out of Central Asia due to a bumper crop in grass or that the Vikings left Scandinavia because of the horrible monotony of the fjords, and you’re likely to be pegged as a determinist without sufficient regard for free will. Yet, as Marshall argues in this pop excursus, geography does have something to do with how we live. Some of us have endless fields of grain, others water, others oil, and even if technology has freed us from some of the limits of old—allowing us to fly, as he puts it, from Missouri to Mosul to unleash a bomb or two—the facts of the land often trump other considerations. In a sense, Marshall’s arguments are old-fashioned. In another, they’re of an everything-old-is-new-again tenor, since, he suggests, 100 years from now, Beijing and New Delhi will still be fighting over resources and there will still be an imposing mountain wall between them. And that pizza that Putin is thinking about, the wedge of the North European Plain, is eternal: “a century from now,” Marshall writes, “Russia will still be looking anxiously westward across what will remain flatland.”
Compulsive globe-spinners won’t find much new in these pages, but Marshall’s broad survey of events in the light of geographical realities goes a long way to explaining Putin’s concerns—and, for that matter, those of the CIA as well.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2146-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Remarkable bravery fluently recounted.
The ably reconstructed story of the author’s convoluted escape from North Korea, detailing the hardships of life there and the serendipity of flight.
A supremely determined young woman, Lee chronicles her life in North Korea and her defection in her late teens in 1998. With the assistance of co-author John, she re-creates a picaresque tale of incredible, suspenseful, and truly death-defying adventures, which eventually led her to asylum in South Korea and then America. The author grew up largely in the northeast province of Ryanggang, bordering the Yalu River with China, and her family home was in Hyesan. Her father was a privileged member of the military, and her enterprising mother was a successful trader on the black market. The family, including younger brother Min-ho, did not endure the hardships of famine like people of low songbun, or caste, but the author learned that her father was not her biological father only shortly before he died by suicide after being trailed by security, beaten, and imprisoned in her mid-teens. Her mother had previously married and divorced another man. At age 17, the lights of China, directly across the river, beckoned, and the author managed to cross and establish contact first with a trading partner of her mother’s, then dissident relatives of her father’s in Shenyang. While the author had no intention of leaving her mother, it was apparent that it was too dangerous for her to return. Her relatives shielded her for a few years, trying to arrange a marriage with a wealthy Korean-Chinese man, from whom the author fled at the eleventh hour. Working as a waitress in Shanghai afforded some invisibility, though she was always susceptible to con men and security police. As the narrative progresses, the author’s trials grow ever more astounding, especially as she eventually tried to get her mother and brother out of North Korea.
Remarkable bravery fluently recounted.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-00-755483-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper360
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
A sharp, compelling, and impassioned book.
A London-based journalist offers her perspective on race in Britain in the early 21st century.
In 2014, Eddo-Lodge published a blog post that proclaimed she was “no longer engaging with white people on the topic of race.” After its viral reception, she realized that her mission should be to do the opposite, so she actively began articulating, rather than suppressing, her feelings about racism. In the first chapter, the author traces her awakening to the reality of a brutal British colonial history and the ways that history continues to impact race relations in the present, especially between blacks and the police. Eddo-Lodge analyzes the system that has worked against blacks and kept them subjugated to laws that work against—rather than for—them. She argues that it is not enough to deconstruct racist structures. White people must also actively see race itself by constantly asking “who benefits from their race and who is disproportionately impacted by negative stereotypes.” They must also understand the extent of the privileges granted them because of their race and work through racist fears that, as British arch-conservative Enoch Powell once said, “the black man will [one day] have the whip hand over the white man.” Eddo-Lodge then explores the fraught question of being a black—and therefore, according to racist stereotype—“angry” female and the ways her “assertiveness, passion and excitement” have been used against her. In examining the relationship between race and class, the author further notes the way British politicians have used the term “white” to qualify working class. By leaving out reference to other members of that class, they “compound the currency-like power of whiteness.” In her probing and personal narrative, Eddo-Lodge offers fresh insight into the way all racism is ultimately a “white problem” that must be addressed by commitment to action, no matter how small. As she writes, in the end, “there's no justice, there's just us.”
A sharp, compelling, and impassioned book.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4088-7055-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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