An accessible, ground-up journalistic study well suited to those who know little about this enigmatic republic.
A comprehensive look at the sleek city-state that strongman Lee Kuan Yew forged into a model society of authority and order.
In his first book, Vasagar, former Singapore and Malaysia correspondent for the Financial Times, fashions an engaging narrative that is both historical and personal; his father lived in Singapore, and the author often visited as a child. Vasagar notes that in order to understand the “forest of glass and steel” that Singapore has become in recent decades, one must grasp both its colonial and breakaway history. Today, he writes, “Singapore is not just a centre of modern Asia…but something bigger—an Asian city state around which the modern world, seeking illumination, revolves.” Established as a British settlement in 1819 by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, it is one of the few places in the world where colonial statues still stand and its British founding is still celebrated. The author delineates the city’s remarkable geography and history, including its occupation by the Japanese in 1942 (it was returned to Britain at the end of World War II). That tumult shaped future leader Lee’s worldview. He was repulsed by the barbarism of the Japanese occupier,” writes Vasagar, “but quietly admired the rarity of crime under Japanese rule.” The author chronicles the communist insurgency against the British in the 1950s and the merger with Malaya, which ended in 1965 when Singapore became a sovereign island nation with Lee at the helm. Over the next decades, Lee pursued “a mix of coercion and cajoling” for both business and society, with an emphasis on meritocracy and fear of communism, and Vasagar insightfully examines the recent and current “ruling elite,” demonstrating their lack of tolerance for crime and squelching of free speech. Among the other “Asian tigers”—South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—Singapore is held up as a great economic success but often at the cost of personal liberty.
An accessible, ground-up journalistic study well suited to those who know little about this enigmatic republic.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-934-0
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
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 Yorkerstaff 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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