An astute, bracing history lesson on a conflict that set off the British notion of “yellow peril” and Chinese victimhood.
The story of “the extraordinary war that has been haunting Sino-Western relations for almost two centuries.”
A fatal misunderstanding between the paternalistic British and the proud Chinese lay at the root of the First Opium War (1839-1842); the British were determined to open Chinese markets, and the Chinese resisted being bullied into submission. Lovell (Chinese History and Literature/Univ. of London; The Great Wall: China Against the World 1000 BC-AD 2000, 2006, etc.) offers extensive analysis of why and how this conflict helped create an entire founding theory of Chinese nationalism—the first step in China’s attempt to “stand up” to imperialist powers, as Mao Zedong put it, only to end with the Communist triumph of 1949. Opium was good business: The poppy fields of India were carefully overseen by the merchants of the East India Company and, like the lucrative tea trade with China, helped keep “the British empire afloat.” China had developed a craving for opium, and the British had grown a whopping trade deficit. While the British turned a blind eye to private merchants dealing in opium off the Chinese coast, the Qing rulers grew alarmed at the effects of opium addiction on the population. Emperor Daoguang, tottering on an unstable empire of Manchu minority and bureaucratic venality, found in opium a scapegoat, and he directed his agent Lin Zexu to inform Queen Victoria to “eliminate opium productions in her dominions.” His British counterpart, Charles Elliott, was either a “scheming genius” or caught in a bind: He allowed Lin to dump more than 20,000 chests of British opium into the Canton River in 1839, thus inviting the British to avenge what they considered a threat to the principle of extraterritorial powers. The rhetoric on both sides revealed deep suspicions of the other, provoking British “gunboat diplomacy,” against which the Chinese were woefully unprepared.
An astute, bracing history lesson on a conflict that set off the British notion of “yellow peril” and Chinese victimhood.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0895-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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