A potent combination of precise history and moving examples, plus a useful chronology of events.
An eminent China scholar uses increasingly available primary materials for a fine, sharp study of this tumultuous, elusive era—the third volume in a trilogy.
In this excellent follow-up to his groundbreaking previous work on the disastrous “crash collectivization” involved in Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward (The Tragedy of Liberation, 2013, etc.) Dikötter (Chair, Humanities/Univ. of Hong Kong) focuses on the next phase in the Chinese communist experiment: the paroxysm of violence and destruction known as the Cultural Revolution. The author emphasizes how the forced land collectivization sowed the seeds for the later brutalization of the people by “herald[ing] a great leap from socialism to communism” in the model of Stalin’s ruthless land reform of the 1930s and by compelling the starving people “to fight in a continuous revolution.” Smarting from Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s brutal purges and cult of personality in his famous speech of Feb. 25, 1956, Mao reacted over the next two decades in cycles of paranoia and defensiveness. He portrayed himself as the champion of the people in encouraging democratic values to flourish in the Hundred Flowers Campaign (before cracking down on dissenters) and then promoted the slogan “Never Forget Class Struggle” and unleashed the Socialist Education Campaign of 1962. His so-called 7 May Directive (1966) articulated a utopian vision of political indoctrination in which the army and the people “fuse to become indistinct.” Using archives and memoirs, Dikötter effectively delineates the spasms of violence that followed: Mao’s exuberant urging of the Red Guards (aka young students) to destroy all the “olds” and embark on a terror campaign to “smash, smash, smash”; the attempt by the military to take control; the periodic “cleansing of the ranks,” from the rank and file with “bad backgrounds” to the upper echelon closest to the chairman—e.g., his heir apparent, Lin Biao. As in his previous two books, Dikötter tells a harrowing tale of unbelievable suffering.
A potent combination of precise history and moving examples, plus a useful chronology of events.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-421-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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