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 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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