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
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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