A lucid if stolid overview of regional history, useful for students of Pacific affairs in playing out scenarios of what...
A long-view look at events that are making China’s neighbors—and much of the world beyond—very nervous indeed.
To understand the present, interrogate the past: it’s always a good habit for those seeking to play power politics on the world stage. In the case of China, by journalist/historian French’s (China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa, 2014, etc.) account, the past is never far from view. One element of it is the Pax Sinica that reigned in the 19th century, when China’s rulers were able to extend Chinese influence over a broad geographical area—particularly far out into the Pacific—by making a calculated trade: “Accept our superiority and we will confer upon you political legitimacy, develop a trade partnership, and provide a range of what are known in the language of modern international affairs as public goods.” The resulting tribute system cost China, in terms of sheer treasure, but provided stability and other rewards. Through a combination of hard and soft power, China is seeking to re-establish something of that regional dominance, coming up against its longtime rival, Japan, but also the United States. That rivalry is playing out in trade disputes, the construction of miniature settlements and even a “prefectural-level city” atop remote coral atolls, and an increased naval presence on the high seas. In that long view, stretching back thousands of years and to more recent moments such as China’s war on Japanese pirates working the waters off Taiwan, these recent developments are of a piece. French does yeomanlike work with these historical patterns, but the more valuable part of his book lies in his deductions of what they mean for future international relations, for those patterns point to a better geopolitical position for the U.S. than other analysts have projected—and all because of demographics and not necessarily any military edge either nation might hold.
A lucid if stolid overview of regional history, useful for students of Pacific affairs in playing out scenarios of what might happen next.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-35332-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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