Ur-socialist Kolko tries—and fails—to come to grips with Vietnam's embrace of a market economy. Kolko (formerly of York Univ., Toronto) goes through hoops trying to explain why Vietnamese communism hasn't worked. In this weakly argued, tediously written tract, the author of Anatomy of a War (1986)—a fervidly anti-American history of the Vietnam War- -castigates a disparate group of socialist enemies, including ignorant, avaricious, market-loving Vietnamese communist apparatchiks, and officials of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), along with the capitalist, imperialist Americans who control them. Kolko, for example, calls Vietnam's Communist Party General Secretary Do Muoi ``an opportunistic, intellectually banal figure.'' Long-time Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet is power-hungry, a ``consummate cynic.'' Kiet's economist Nguyen Xuan Oanh is ``a consummate opportunist'' and a ``key link with the IMF.'' World Bank and IMF officials have blackmailed Vietnam, Kolko claims, offering much-needed loans to gain the ``prize'' of ``abolishing socialism.'' In prose that often reads like a rhetoric-strewn ultraradical political tract, Kolko concentrates on the economic changes that have come since 1985 with the introduction of liberalized market-economic reforms (read: capitalism). Although he calls the American war in Vietnam a ``terrible crime against humanity,'' Kolko ignores communist Vietnam's human-rights abuses, both during the war and since. He seems never to have heard the words ``re-education camps'' and skips very lightly over the current Vietnamese government's shortcomings, including press censorship and a still-strong secret police. An embarrassing attempt by Kolko—more socialist than Ho Chi Minh—to explain why his beloved Vietnamese communists have aided and abetted ``the ultimate American victory over socialism.''
Pub Date: July 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-415-15989-X
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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