An expert, disturbing history.
The mostly painful history of the U.S. and its struggling ex-colony.
MIT history professor Capozzola writes that events in Cuba provoked America’s declaration of war on Spain in 1898. Few paid attention to its Asian colonies until the U.S. Asiatic Squadron, led by George Dewey, annihilated the Spanish fleet off its Philippines colony. American officials believed that an imperial power such as Britain or Germany would certainly take over if America didn’t. There followed a nasty war in which American forces (and locally recruited units) suppressed the Filipino independence movement. Capozzola notes that the American promise of eventual independence was sincere, and the colonial administration set up a local political infrastructure. This was done on the cheap, however, so Filipinos who benefited most serviced Americans or came to the U.S. Racist immigration laws in the U.S. banned Asians, but the Philippines, as a colony, was an exception. Readers can skim the author’s account of World War II, which is largely unedifying. At the time, most Filipinos gave survival priority over resistance. Guerrilla activity slowly grew, but rival groups often fought each other, and many were little better than bandits. The most efficient, the Hukbalahap, were communists. At the end of the war, the Philippines was a devastated nation with no Marshall Plan to rebuild it. As a final insult, Congress, in an economic move, denied Filipino soldiers the GI Bill of Rights. The U.S. granted independence in 1946; supported Manuel Roxas, the collaborationist president under Japanese occupation who won the first presidency; and signed a pact granting 23 military bases free from local criminal laws and taxes. Capozzola convincingly argues that the nation remains a quasi-colony, impoverished and ill-governed. Its leaders understood that America favored nations threatened by communism and, later, terrorism. Even today, it hosts America’s “largest counterterrorist deployment outside of Afghanistan.” U.S. presidents have spoken highly of several despotic kleptocrats, led by Ferdinand Marcos. Today’s Rodrigo Duterte, a violent figure, is favored by Donald Trump.
An expert, disturbing history.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5416-1827-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
HISTORY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | MODERN | MILITARY | UNITED STATES | WORLD
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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