Accessible and of interest to students of international relations but mostly intended for military historians and Asia...
A vigorous military history of China, linking technological changes to political events over time.
There is a push and pull in trade and innovation. As Andrade (History/Emory Univ.; Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory over the West, 2011, etc.) notes, Chinese gunpowder inspired the development of a range of Western arms that then returned to China, only to be further developed there and radiated outward—far from the static model found in many histories, which hold that China copied but did not innovate, fearful of violating Confucian values of stability and hierarchy. It was Confucian scholars, Andrade writes, who “studied gunpowder weapons, tested them, experimented with their manufacture, developed tactics and strategies for deploying them, and wrote about all of this in detail.” Stimuli for development came from trade and contact with far-flung nations, including Japan and Vietnam, as well as the European powers that came calling. The weakness of the Chinese state when those powers divided China in the 19th century has been attributed to a long period of resource-wasting internal wars, but Andrade holds that conflict was but one cause among many, including ethnic tensions and poor governance. Moreover, warfare has proven a spur for innovation and political concentration, yielding dynasties and such tools as the “thunderclap bomb.” In initial contact with Europeans, the Chinese were outgunned, but they adjusted, incorporating Western-style arms against the invading Portuguese, for instance. The Sino-Portuguese wars, writes the author, “mark a watershed in military history, inaugurating a period of deep military innovation in China.” Today, Andrade writes, China is similarly innovative, and the pattern of history suggests that its long period of consolidation may herald a time of “huge wars of expansion.” If this signals a “new warring states period,” then the world may be condemned to live in interesting times indeed.
Accessible and of interest to students of international relations but mostly intended for military historians and Asia specialists.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-691-13597-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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
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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