A lively examination of the intransigent persistence of nationalism.
A debut book offers a history of nationalism and its application to contemporary global affairs.
Especially since the creation of the European Union, it’s become popular to discuss this political age as post-national, meaning that the division of the world into sovereign entities has been transcended for the sake of geopolitical cooperation. Decock avers, however, that the new international theater has been built on top of the nation-state rather than supplanting it. The author begins this impressively wide-ranging study with a history of nationalism, which developed over a 200-year swath of time, forged out of the bloody French Revolution. Decock discusses nationalism not only as a political form, but also as an ideology, a psychological construct, a consequence of evolving socio-economic realities, and a cultural phenomenon. The author contends that nationalism is spawned by a historically peculiar emphasis on national self-determination, which was impossible without the establishment of a homogenously shared language. One of the most intriguing discussions in the book examines the tension between “Lockean democrats,” who believe a certain incarnation of the modern nation is possible despite extraordinary cultural and linguistic diversity, and acolytes of John Stuart Mill, who see that as a fantastical pipe dream. Decock makes his own position abundantly clear: “The contradiction between the multilingual society and the monolingual state constitutes the nationalist challenge, paradox, or dilemma.” And while the author largely avoids in-depth analysis of either Africa or Asia, there are still memorable aperçus about the difficulty of understanding China, India, or Indonesia through the filter of a political model that seems simply inapplicable. Given the technicality of the subject, Decock mercifully avoids foreboding academic language and doggedly pursues a thesis without devolving into strident dogmatism. One could have hoped for a more searching and philosophically nuanced history of the origins of nationalism—many scholars trace the germ of its emergence as far back as Machiavelli’s The Prince. But the treatment of contemporary political affairs, especially of the future of the U.S. in light of its own potentially multilinguistic citizenry, is razor-sharp. This is a rigorous, thorough, and timely contribution to an oft-misunderstood subject.
A lively examination of the intransigent persistence of nationalism.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5049-9794-2
Page Count: 340
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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