With useful maps and stories within stories, this is an ingenious look at an often misunderstood country.
A Canadian scholar of Chinese history offers a fresh look at China’s engagement with the outside world over centuries in the form of 13 illustrative stories.
In this academic yet mostly accessible work, Brook makes two significant revisionist arguments about China and its history. First, he moves up China’s sense of being a unified state from the third century B.C.E., when it developed “dispersed kingdoms,” to the 13th century, when its occupation by the Mongol armies imbued it with a sense of military domination exercised through conquest. This was the self-important “Mongol Great State,” and every ruler since then has declared his regime to be a “Great State,” according to Brook. Second, the author argues that, contrary to the myth of Chinese isolation from the world, the nation was very much aware of the “10,000 countries” that lay outside it, as the author relays through fascinating stories of contact. These involve a wide variety of protagonists that may be unfamiliar to many readers, including the “Persian Blue Princess” whom Khubilai Khan recruited for the Mongol throne; Korean emissaries who blew off course and landed in China; the Italian Jesuit missionaries who spread Renaissance ideas; and the droves of European traders descending on ports such as Canton. Indeed, Brook reminds us, China has frequently endured waves of conquest and occupation by “foreign” armies, from the marauding Mongol hordes led by Khan, who established the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), to the subsequent rise of the Ming Dynasty until 1644, when the Manchus swept through and established the Qing Great State, which collapsed in 1911. Brook then takes us all the way up to the early 21st century, noting how “China’s relationship with the world will continue to change.” The author also turns up intriguing new DNA evidence that the plague had likely emerged from Central Asia and devastated Chinese cities far earlier than it arrived in Europe.
With useful maps and stories within stories, this is an ingenious look at an often misunderstood country.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-295098-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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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