Asian History majors will find this one on their reading lists.
A concise history with a textbook tone, covering Japanese civilization from about 1600.
Gordon (History/Harvard) chronicles Japanese social evolution during two dynasties, the Tokugawa and the Meiji. Superficially, he argues, the former bore little resemblance to the latter. But in terms of how they controlled Japanese society, the later regime was a logical extension of the earlier one. And both depended on the emperor for legitimacy. But while Tokugawa officials used the emperor as a mere sideshow to validate their real power, Meiji leaders placed the emperor at the center of Japanese culture, a move that helped the country grow authoritarian and militaristic. Unlike their isolationist predecessors, the Meiji decided the emperor was necessary because they felt something had to unify a Japan that was rapidly changing with the introduction of Western technology and manner of life. Women, for example, were becoming waitresses, and simple common folk (widely seen as literally stupid during the Tokugawa era) were questioning policies of the government, which for the first time had to react to worldwide economic trends. Like the Tokugawa, the Meiji dynasty didn’t trust the people, so in the Japanese constitution they placed the emperor as supreme commander of the army and navy. Because the emperor was a figurehead, however, nobody controlled the generals and admirals who believed Japan had to secure foreign resources in order to stay on par with the Western powers. The Pacific war followed. Gordon uses a textbook organization, dividing his subject into the political and social realms. (War buffs will be disappointed—there’s more here about intellectuals than about Pearl Harbor.) His discussion of contemporary Japan continues logically from his earlier observations, and the centered quality of Japanese society, he suggests—now in the thrall of business interests—has brought the country two steps forward and sent it one step back.
Asian History majors will find this one on their reading lists.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-19-511060-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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