Everything you might want to know about the Chinese economic juggernaut, and then some, from a Dutch journalist who has covered the region for 25 years. China is now the third-largest economic power in the world. Foreign investment in the country has grown from $51 million in 1979 to a total of $200 billion in 1995, and its foreign trade from $20 billion to $281 billion over the same period. These figures are fairly well known, but the value of van Kemenade's book lies in the detail he supplies on how this growth has affected different regions of China. It lies, too, in the sensible things he has to say about the limitations on that growth: Its so-called ``socialist market economy,'' he notes, is still a ``fragile halfway house,'' and the prediction that the Chinese economy would exceed that of the US by the end of the century has now been discarded. In many other respects his emphases are unusual and refreshing. The author argues that both Hong Kong and Taiwan (in terms of both money and managerial skills) have made essential contributions to the metamorphosis of China from a predominantly state economy to economic pluralism, although he finds increasing divisions in Taipei over the wisdom of its growing economic involvement on the mainland. Indeed, he notes how skillfully the Chinese government has played upon the divisions between the Taiwanese government and its capitalists. And only the hard core of China's faithful in Hong Kong still pretend to believe that Hong Kong will have much autonomy after the transfer of power. More doubtful is his belief, so characteristic of observers of dictatorships before revolutions, that there is ``no mass demand'' for democracy, and that internal, more or less peaceful development is unlikely to bring it about. Nonetheless, one of the most thorough, comprehensive, and balanced assessments of the rise and likely evolution of a world- class economy.
Pub Date: June 15, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-45484-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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