An infectious, satisfying exercise in intellectual doggedness.
A work of exuberant scholarship radiates from a map of China bequeathed to Oxford’s Bodleian Library in 1659.
Brook’s (History/Univ. of British Columbia; The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, 2010, etc.) mentor was the legendary “English historian of Chinese science” Joseph Needham, and Brook creates an intriguing intellectual detective story around a map that the author was summoned to examine several years ago. Evidently the work of a Chinese cartographer, it was an enormous and beautifully wrought map that just didn’t fit with the usual work of the Ming period and thus puzzled scholars. It centered on the South China Sea, rather than the landmass of China, and it was strikingly accurate in terms of modern proportions and coordinates. Tracking down the English lawyer John Selden, who had left the map to the library upon his death as part of an enormous donation of books and manuscripts, yielded the writings of this brilliant 17th-century scholar who was embroiled in the raging debates of the day over free trade and the rights of citizens versus sovereignty of the king. Brook works backward in uncovering the provenance of the map, from the first Chinese scholar at Oxford, Michael Shen, encouraged as part of the passion generated for Oriental languages by Selden and others; to the East India Company commander John Saris, who traded in Asian goods and probably brought the map to England as payment of a debt; to the strange and wonderful Chinese characters and symbols on the map itself, which reveal it to be a sophisticated charting of sea routes by a canny cartographer with some acquaintance of European maps and of Southeast maritime trading.
An infectious, satisfying exercise in intellectual doggedness.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62040-143-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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
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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