Encounters with America, writes Raghavan, have not always been negative, but as his book shows, there’s much room for...
A critical, sometimes embarrassing account of American relations with the major nations of South Asia.
Americans have been poking around in South Asia since the beginning of the republic. As Raghavan (India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia, 2016), a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, writes, the British Raj refused to issue credentials to George Washington’s choice of consul, a businessman who had been living for years in Calcutta. “Britain’s reluctance to sanction an American consul stemmed mainly from its desire not to dilute its hold over the Indian economy,” writes the author, but the Americans kept at it, establishing themselves as an important trading partner in an economy that has done nothing but grow. At the same time, and especially in the period since Indian independence, the U.S. has not quite known what to do with India. Some administrations have been friendly, others eager to treat China as the sole Asian power worth dealing with, and still others more inclined to side with Pakistan in the binational rivalry. Things have become no less murky in recent decades, and the result has been a particularly difficult relationship. During the Eisenhower administration, for example, India’s policy of nonalignment could mean nothing but a pro-communist stance, with China, in the words of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, “attempting to rally all of Asia to rise up to eject violently all Western influence.” A case in point in America’s difficulty in wrapping its collective diplomatic head around South Asia is a dam project in Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley, modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority, which “would at once cater to irrigation, electricity, and farm extension." Begun in the early 1950s, it has met only partial success, though the opium trade has certainly benefited from irrigated poppy fields.
Encounters with America, writes Raghavan, have not always been negative, but as his book shows, there’s much room for improvement.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-465-03019-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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