An up-and-down examination in which the author claims that the future of the Pacific Rim will be decided not by what China...
A foreign policy expert looks at the major players in the Southeast Asia Pacific Rim and their nervous watching of what China will do.
Atlantic foreign correspondent Kaplan (The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, 2012, etc.) frequently refers to geography as key in determining developments in the countries he addresses with his keen insight: namely, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Taiwan and China. Indeed, these—save the Philippines, still mired in American colonial dependency—have evolved into post–Cold War economic dynamos, with varying blends of democracy and authoritarianism. Thus, for the first time, they can “flex their muscles at sea” by making territorial claims against each other regarding the rich oil and natural gas reserves harbored among the straits and the hundreds of islands scattered throughout the area. Kaplan compares China’s position amid the South China Sea grouping as akin to America’s “practically sovereign” regard of the Greater Caribbean—that is, if China were finally to “Finlandize” Taiwan and replace the U.S. Navy’s domination in the area. As the U.S. downgrades its naval presence and continues to be distracted by wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere, China is ramping up its military presence. Although Kaplan claims there is no “moral fury” roiling the area, his discrete breakdown of each country delineates many troubling authoritarian histories, with a blithe dismissal of democratic tenets. For example, Kaplan acknowledges the ends-justifies-the-means approach of China’s Deng Xiaoping and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, who effected economic miracles while ruling with an iron grip. The author’s considerations of jihadist insurgent threats in Indonesia and elsewhere seem tepid.
An up-and-down examination in which the author claims that the future of the Pacific Rim will be decided not by what China does but by what America does.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9432-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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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