Griffin bites off a huge story but manages to maintain lively interest in the array of personalities involved.
A quirky, thoroughly enjoyable trek through the implausible beginnings of international table tennis and the colorful characters-cum-diplomats behind it.
Griffin (Dizzy City, 2007, etc.) has the dexterity and cleverness to take on the story of British aristocrat Ivor Montagu, son of an English baron who was schooled at Cambridge, where he took up Ping-Pong at the end of World War I. An imperial British entertainment on the wane at the time, “teetering between sport and punch line,” Ping-Pong would get its boost when Montagu renamed it table tennis (he discovered that Ping-Pong was trademarked by a toy manufacturer) and established its rules and regulations, organizing the Table Tennis Association and promoting championships, first across Europe, then behind the Iron Curtain and into Asia. He wrote: “I saw in Table Tennis a sport particularly suited to the lower paid,” he wrote. “I plunged into the game as a crusade.” Indeed, Montagu became a devoted communist; he also worked in film, importing the work of Soviet filmmakers and helping Alfred Hitchcock “weave outlandish plots into ordinary settings.” Shadowed by MI5, Montagu traveled seamlessly from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War to the world tennis championship in Prague. After the war, he lobbied to include the Soviets in international competition, as well as Japan and communist China, where the sport was highly popular and political. Griffin delineates the significant championship matches held in Tokyo in 1956 and in China in 1961, at the height of Mao Zedong’s catastrophic famine, which the world did not yet fathom. The same Chinese players disgraced during the Cultural Revolution were quickly rehabilitated in 1971 in order to act as convenient instruments of détente for the two frosty antagonists, Mao and Nixon.
Griffin bites off a huge story but manages to maintain lively interest in the array of personalities involved.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4277-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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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