Nine highly uneven pieces on current and future international politics by the prolific contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly (An Empire Wilderness, 1998, etc.). The clear highlight here is the fascinating, much-discussed and -reprinted title essay. In contrast to Frances Fukuyama’s view that the collapse of communism has heralded an ideological and political “end of history,” Kaplan warns that the early 21st century may be characterized in the underdeveloped world by urban overcrowding and disease, environmental degradation (which will be “the national security issue”), tribalistic warfare, the breakdown of central governmental authority, and a concomitant rise in crime. Unfortunately, Kaplan’s penchant for sweeping generalizations—for instance, his dubious claim that “the parliamentary system the West promoted was a factor in the murder of thousands of Tutsis by Hutu militias [in Rwanda]——too often undermines his other essays. In “Kissinger, Metternich and Realism” he follows his celebration of hardheaded realpolitik (“It is . . . likely that in prolonging the [Vietnam] war for the reasons they did, Kissinger and Nixon demonstrated more real character than do many of our present leaders—) by admitting that “some of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s actions were . . . spectacularly brutal and unnecessary.— In his final essay the author reveals that his great bugaboo is, of all things, peace, which he feels will make the average citizen self-absorbed, complacent, and forgetful of history: “The Cold War has been as close to utopia as we are ever likely to get. . . . Because the Cold War was a low-level extension of World War II, it also gave us a sense of the past. War does that, peace does not.” Such historical generalizations come so fast and furious, so isolated from such factors as politics, education, culture, technology, and the mass media, that they may well leave readers who persevere past the scintillating title essay unedified and disoriented.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50354-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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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