A specific, targeted, and nuanced exploration of how the Korean War and Cold War–era battlefield moved inside and became a...
An academic study of the changing nature of war post-1945 in terms of the struggle to claim political recognition of the prisoner of war, specifically within the Korean War.
In this dense and compelling work, Kim (History/New York Univ.) deeply investigates the POW repatriation tactics used as political propaganda on both sides of the Korean War. When the 38th parallel shifted from a temporary border between American and Soviet spheres of military occupation to a sovereign border between the China-bolstered Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the U.S.–occupied Republic of Korea, the POW became the pawn between the two sides; the DPRK insisted on “mandatory” repatriation, while the ROK argued for voluntary. “The figure of the prisoner of war,” writes the author, “was essentially a distillation of the relationship between the state and its subject….Through the [POW], one could challenge both the legitimacy of the enemy state’s governance and the superiority of the enemy state’s conduce of warfare.” Moreover, while the interrogation rooms were flexible in how they manifested—“an idealized site of regulated and willing exchange”—the interrogator and translator on the American side was most often a Japanese-American man who had spent his adolescence incarcerated in U.S. internment camps during World War II; thus, he became an instrument in the U.S. “liberal” state’s efforts at decolonization and state-building. Kim explores how this generation brought its painful former experiences with internment to the interrogation room within the landscape of a former Japanese colony. The author also leads us through the reams of documentation needed to build this new war of bureaucracy and examines troubling instances of “mutiny” and “brainwashing.”
A specific, targeted, and nuanced exploration of how the Korean War and Cold War–era battlefield moved inside and became a new “struggle of political legitimacy waged within human psyches, souls, and desires.”Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-691-16622-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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