by Jasper Becker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 8, 2000
An authoritative, detailed, and nonintimidating treatment of a fascinating and often misunderstood subject. (maps and...
A remarkably thorough and up-to-date portrait of the Chinese state—“probably the oldest functioning organization in the world”—and the 1.3 billion people inhabiting it.
British journalist Becker (Hungry Ghosts, 1997) begins with a brief historical sketch that underscores China’s 2,000-year tendency to embrace highly centralized, authoritarian forms of government, thus revealing the cultural roots of Chinese Communism. The author examines the fate the Chinese people, from the poorest of the poor (and the tax collectors and local party leaders who abuse and oppress them) to the emerging class of quasi-entrepreneurs (who benefit from a fundamentally corrupt system of “public” asset management) to the tiny elite of Communist Party officials (who struggle to maintain strict control over their society, even while hoping to prosper from the dynamism of global capitalism). Becker’s restrained prose only heightens the absurdity and horror of many of the situations he describes—the recent development of the sex industry in Hainan, for example, or the 1970 earthquake in Yunnan province that killed 15,000 but was kept a secret by the provincial bureaucrats for months. “When news reached the [national] authorities . . . the People’s Liberation Army was dispatched to the area, and there it distributed not relief supplies but copies of The Thoughts of Chairman Mao.” In the epilogue, Becker allows himself some well-earned summary judgments about the nation’s prospects, concluding that China’s incipient movements toward democracy and capitalism are threatened, not just by its long history of autocratic rule but also by its deep debts, emerging environmental crises, and age-old reliance on secrecy, lies, and propaganda at all levels of the bureaucracy.
An authoritative, detailed, and nonintimidating treatment of a fascinating and often misunderstood subject. (maps and illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-84412-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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