Neither alarmist nor apologist, one of the clearest and most enjoyable accounts of China currently available.
Dispatches from Atlantic Monthly national correspondent Fallows (Blind Into Baghdad: America’s War in Iraq, 2006, etc.) capture with clarity and humor the present and future of the country that could be the next world superpower.
China is in the midst of an astonishing economic boom that is fantastically anarchic, despite the heavy-handed political controls of the Communist Party. Those who are young, smart and ambitious, writes the author, can seize unprecedented opportunities for wealth and success. A popular reality-TV show, Win in China (loosely based on Donald Trump’s The Apprentice), which has would-be entrepreneurs competing for a million dollars in seed money, conveys the message that anyone might have such chances. Fallows profiles visionary billionaire technology whiz kids who have created entire cities to house their production facilities. He travels to the Pearl River Delta in southern China, where factories the size of airports employ, feed and house as many as 250,000 workers, and five factories turn out 90 percent of the laptops sold by “competing” Western companies. At the local Sheraton, Fallows details the delicate dance between Western company representatives who want to set up production in China and expatriate middlemen who locate the factories they need. He also offers sober analysis of China’s dire environmental state, as well as a moving and enlightening portrait of earthquake-ravaged western Sichuan. Finally, amidst the cacophony of Chinese productivity, Fallows pauses to consider what it all means to the United States. China is simply too busy to be a political or military threat, he concludes. If our economic relations with this powerhouse leave us worried and uneasy, he notes, that is not China’s concern but our own. It is our responsibility to learn how to compete successfully in the new economic order it exemplifies.
Neither alarmist nor apologist, one of the clearest and most enjoyable accounts of China currently available.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-45624-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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