Informative and entertaining perspectives on Asia.
In this scattershot collection, Buruma (Anglomania, 1999, etc.) examines a wide range of cultural, sensual, and destructive encounters between East and West and the gross, subtle, and sometimes violent ways in which Orient and Occident have misunderstood and changed each other.
Buruma’s dichotomy of “missionary and libertine” sums up contrasting Orientalist misperceptions of the Far East: at the extremes, Westerners often viewed Asian countries as zones of guilt-free eroticism and, on the other hand, as places in need of the bracing discipline of Western morality. Asians, in turn, have had their sometimes-surprising take on the West, on colonialism, and on their own traditional cultures. Critiquing the literature, popular culture, film, and politics of Asia, Buruma meditates on some of the results: the disorienting blend of Western-style narcissism with traditional Japanese themes in the life of the “suicidal dandy” novelist Yukio Mishima; the kitschy work of Japanese writer Yoshimoto Banana; the Tokyo musings of American Japanophile Edwin Seidensticker; the Western-influenced work of Bengali director Satyajit Ray and novelist V.S. Naipaul; the real-life affair between Mircea Eliade and Maitreyi Dasgupta, and its literary aftermath; the political autobiography of the Radcliffe-educated Benazir Bhutto; the peculiar combination of racism and benevolence that characterized the American conquest and rule of the Philippines; Hong Kong’s transition to Chinese rule; contrasting Japanese and US views of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and the mutual underestimation of Japanese and American that helped cause the Pearl Harbor attack and persists today. Complementing the generous scope of the author’s imagination is Buruma’s humane and literate voice, which illuminates the cultural (and other) contrasts between East and West while always engaging the reader.
Informative and entertaining perspectives on Asia.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50222-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
