An engaging addition to Chinese history that offers many insights for general readers.
Historical account of two significant Jewish families who built wildly prosperous financial empires in Shanghai and Hong Kong that lasted for nearly two centuries.
From opium trading to banking to real estate, the Sassoon and Kadoorie families “helped open the world to China—and opened China to the world.” As Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Kaufman notes, they were “taipans,” alternately revered, feared, and loathed by the Chinese, who have largely “obscured” their stories since 1949. The author—who covered the Tiananmen Square massacre and also served as the China bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal from 2002 to 2005—digs deep to unearth their personal histories, creating an absorbing multigenerational saga. He begins with patriarch David Sassoon, who was descended from centuries of Baghdad Jewish royalty and was hounded out by the Ottoman rulers in 1830; he landed in Bombay at the height of the British Empire. Fully anglicized and prospering in the trade of cotton and opium, he sent his sons to function as ambassadors to various world outposts. Elias, one of his sons, outmaneuvered British rivals and cornered the market on opium distribution. Later, David’s grandson Victor Sassoon rose from “dilettante figurehead” to impresario, building the famous Cathay Hotel, which transformed the Shanghai skyline. He also helped forge the so-called “China Lobby,” which financially backed the nationalist regime under Chiang Kai-shek. Meanwhile, Elly Kadoorie, apprenticed in the Sassoon schools for businessmen in Bombay, enriched himself and his wife, Laura, and sons in finance, especially via investment in rubber. He also built opulent hotels and other luxury projects in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Both families’ fortunes were decimated with the Communist takeover, and while their wealth overshadowed the enormous poverty of the Chinese, Kaufman argues persuasively that their entrepreneurial drive built a lasting capitalist legacy in the country. While acknowledging the official Chinese version of history, the author does a service by examining “other truths” as well.
An engaging addition to Chinese history that offers many insights for general readers.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2441-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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 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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