A useful key to understanding the role of China in the modern world, a role that is increasingly influential.
Richly detailed, occasionally ponderous study of a political ideology that, while often disastrous, endures in many guises today.
Lovell (Modern China/Birkbeck Coll., Univ. of London; The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of Modern China, 2014, etc.) dissects a strain of political thought that rests on Marxism, Leninism, and Stalinism while partaking of Chinese traditions stretching back thousands of years. As she writes, Mao “assembled a practical and theoretical toolkit for turning a fractious, failing empire into a defiant global power,” one that turned a huge population to the service of a machine that was part utopian experiment and part totalitarian nightmare. Maoist thought, by Lovell’s incisive, sometimes-dry account, was a confusion of terms, propaganda, and pragmatics. As a man of rural origins, Mao held the peasantry in higher regard than the urban sophisticates who helped modernize the Chinese economy. He “acclaimed the brilliance of the (rural) masses,” holding that only their ideas were correct, then led from the top all the same, turning Marxist thought into crude, blunt messages that boiled down to class struggle and yielded calamitous famines and the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution. So how did the ideas of the Red Emperor spread as widely as they did in the West? One was his devotion, on paper if not always in reality, to feminist ideals; the Maoist formulation “women hold up half the sky” is a standard of T-shirt slogans today. Just so, Maoist political movements have long outlived their creator—Shining Path in Peru, guerrilla groups in India and Nepal, offshoots everywhere, including, to no small extent, Trumpism in America, which hinges on the same cult of personality. Even in China, which had plenty of experience with the disasters of Maoism, the ideology is, if not openly encouraged, officially tolerated. The government of Xi Jinping may have declared the Cultural Revolution “utterly wrong,” but Maoism is evident everywhere, “caught between official oppression and ambivalence, commercial kitschification and inchoate grass-roots sentiment.”
A useful key to understanding the role of China in the modern world, a role that is increasingly influential.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-65604-3
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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