A useful look at the shaping of the modern world.
Nature may abhor a vacuum, but nations cannot survive one. Thus the scramble for power at the end of the Pacific War, which set the stage for a dozen other wars.
The Japanese surrender ended World War II, in theory. But, reveals Spector (History/George Washington Univ.; At War at Sea, 2001, etc.), Japanese forces remained in place throughout the former Japanese empire; in Vietnam and Korea, for instance, Japanese troops and police kept the peace until Allied forces could take control, which took months in some cases. Some Japanese regarded the surrender as a temporary measure, predicting a return to regional power and even plotting armed uprisings. When it developed that the surrender was more stable than all that and as Japanese forces were finally repatriated, old political rivalries quickly surfaced. In China, the war between nationalist and communist forces intensified. Emboldened by official U.S. opposition to colonialism and widespread resistance to renewed Dutch rule, guerrillas in Indonesia paved the way for independence, while their counterparts in Malaya and Singapore faced tougher British opposition. And in Vietnam, the Vietminh began to wage a determined war on the French, aided by as many as 3,000 Japanese deserters who, like one officer, “could not bear the thought of returning to Japan when most of his comrades had died for the Empire.” Lacking any balance of power, East Asia erupted into a succession of battlefields, and the presence of foreign powers only hindered the restoration of order; looking squarely at developments in today’s Iraq, Spector writes, “Viewed as an effort to establish peace and stability…the occupations were a resounding failure…. By 1948 all the states occupied by the Americans, British, and Russians were at war, either with their former colonial rulers or with political factions within their own country, sometimes both.”
A useful look at the shaping of the modern world.Pub Date: July 17, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-50915-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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