Provides useful context for the troubled, tangled history of U.S. dealings with China, a timely topic.
A study of the Communist victory in China in 1949 and the American role in the events leading to that triumph.
The McCarthyites who charged that Harry Truman gave China to Mao Zedong’s Communist regime had a point, at least of sorts. By former Newsweek senior writer and bureau chief Peraino’s (Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power, 2013) solid, if not groundbreaking, account, the Truman administration was simply outmaneuvered at several critical turns, with Mao and his lieutenants exploiting divisions among the Western powers. “The American interest in China was slightly amorphous, owing more to spiritual concerns than to material ones,” writes the author, whereas the interests of Great Britain were decidedly material. While Winston Churchill advocated building a Pacific pact to shore up China’s Asian neighbors, some elements within the Truman administration were in favor of direct intervention, even as Dean Acheson and other officials in the State Department shared Churchill’s stance. The U.S. was also seriously played by Madame Chiang, the jet-setter wife of Chiang Kai-shek, who instructed her to finagle $1 billion dollars per year to support his nationalist regime, soon to be exiled to Taiwan. Though the administration had plenty of misgivings about Chiang, “by publicly outlining his qualms about the Nationalist government, Truman would ensure its total collapse.” An inexperienced Cabinet did not help matters. Peraino competently navigates through a labyrinth of backroom deals and intrigues, and he is good at placing the China question in the larger context of the unfolding early Cold War and America’s fixation on communism, which served Chiang particularly well even as Truman’s representatives tried to steer him from making a fortress of his island refuge. In the end, writes the author, Mao’s diplomatic and military victories encouraged him to confront American forces in Korea, with reverberations that continue to sound today.
Provides useful context for the troubled, tangled history of U.S. dealings with China, a timely topic.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-307-88723-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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 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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