A groundbreaking account of one of the least examined atrocities of WW II. Drawing on women's and soldiers' personal accounts, official records, and the work of a handful of other researchers, Hicks describes the forced prostitution of some 100,000 women. All over Asia, from Korea to Indonesia and elsewhere, women (usually from lower castes or classes) were kidnapped, raped, and then forced to service soldiers who were often derangedboth from combat and from the Japanese army's sadistic and authoritarian discipline. Though the military required that women receive regular medical examinations and that all clients wear condoms, disease in the brothels was rampant; many women were left infertile or physically unable to enjoy sex for the rest of their lives. Many others were so psychologically traumatized that they were unable to have normal relationships or even to support themselves financially. Though according to Hicks more than 2.5 million Japanese soldiers must have known about this practice, only recentlythanks to the rise of feminism in Asia and the concurrent efforts of scholars, activists, and survivorshas it become an acceptable topic of public discussion, and only in the past few years has the Japanese government begun to acknowledge any responsibility for the women's suffering. Many survivors are now demanding compensation from Japan. Their personal stories are well chosen, often graphic, and deeply disturbing. Hicks balances the horror stories with examples of resistance; a group of Australian nurses in Sumatra, for instance, refused outright to have sex with the men and were released. Some women escaped or made life in the brothels more bearable by striking up friendships or romances with favored soldiers. Painful and scrupulously researched. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03807-6
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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