A work of enormous heart as well as research.
A satisfying, elegant personal journey in China’s fabled Northeast.
A Peace Corps volunteer in China in 1995, Meyer spent subsequent years teaching English in a rapidly changing Beijing, where he wrote his first book, The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed (2008). Against the usual logic (the Chinese were leaving the land to flock to the cities), the author settled in the remote Northeast, in a town called Wasteland, Manchuria, the hometown of his Chinese wife, Frances. There, working as a middle school teacher while living among Frances’ eccentric relatives, Meyer realized that he was interested in exploring China’s past. A rice-growing center, Wasteland (founded in 1956) was closer to Vladivostok and Pyongyang than the Great Wall. It was once the heart of the Manchu, who stormed through the country on horseback and seized Beijing in 1644, ruled for 300 years, and added the territory of Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Eventually, the Manchu mingled with the infiltrating Han Chinese; as a result, today Manchu make up less than 10 percent of the region’s 110 million residents. In addition to providing a variety of tender tales of the local folk (e.g., “The Ballad of Auntie Yi”), Meyer inserts profound and troubling observations, such as the official desecration of cultural artifacts in the name of development and the fact that many of the residents first came with families fleeing the famine of the Cultural Revolution era. Throughout, Meyer moves gingerly through Manchurian history—the gradual weakening of the Qing court as China opened to the West; the building of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, bringing geopolitical hostilities; and the conquest of the region by imperial Japan and creation of Manchukuo in 1931—yet the author ends in a hopeful fashion: a pregnancy.
A work of enormous heart as well as research.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1620402863
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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