An estimable and vital work of history that honors the Chinese American experience.
Giving voice to the first Asian Americans.
An editor at the New Yorker, Luo says that the impetus for writing this book was a random encounter on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in the fall of 2016, a few weeks before the presidential election. While he was standing outside a restaurant with his family, a woman passed them, then turned around, yelling, “Go back to China!” That incident prompted Luo to write “An Open Letter to the Woman Who Told My Family to Go Back to China,” which appeared on the front page of the New York Times, generating an outpouring of reader response. When anti-Asian violence surged across the country in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Luo finally decided to write a narrative history of the Chinese experience in America. Such books of history are, of course, legion, and Luo relies on many of these, in addition to original archival research, to craft his own narrative. What distinguishes it from the others, however, is that Luo’s book, though sweeping in scope, is also microscopic when it comes to stories. He writes about, for instance, not only Yung Wing, the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university (Yale, class of 1854) and later a prominent diplomat, but also many minor characters who have hitherto remained anonymous in the annals of history. Whether it is the 1871 Chinese massacre in Los Angeles or the brutal killing of Chinese in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885, we now know, thanks to Luo’s meticulous digging, the names and stories of some of the survivors of these infamous race riots. Readers interested in American history, not only Chinese American history, will savor these pages.
An estimable and vital work of history that honors the Chinese American experience.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548571
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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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