An astute work that examines all facets of this Orwellian state.
A thorough probing of the ongoing causes behind North Korea’s “march of misery.”
There is no shortage of recent works by Westerners attempting to crack the deeply insulated pariah state of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, most notably Andrei Lankov’s The Real North Korea and Victor Cha’s The Impossible State. Yet Shanghai-based Asia commentator French (Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China, 2012, etc.) offers excellent insight into the economic machinations that have kept the Kim dynasty afloat since 1948 despite catastrophic cycles of industrial collapse, famine, nuclear brinkmanship and military oppression. One of the last Cold War holdouts, the DPRK, unlike China, is so entrenched in its guiding philosophy of Juche, or self-sufficiency, that it has been unable to instigate the same kinds of economic reforms as China. Not without trying: French carefully looks at the North Korean attempts, under Kim Jong-il and the watchful eyes of the Chinese, to instigate some much-needed reforms in 2002—e.g., price reforms and the ending of the public distribution system, along with the implementation of a special economic zone, Sinuiju, which failed largely due to the lack of any infrastructure in the area. The wasteful and absurd policies of the rigid command economy mean there is no room for the development of private enterprise. Coupled with the discouragement of foreign investment, outmoded industry, unwise agricultural systems and underutilized natural resources, French sees the recipe for repeated economic stagnation and decline, forcing the DPRK to rely on subsidies from the Soviet Union (while they lasted) and China. As long as the Kim leadership pursues its “military first” campaign, thereby spending its precious resources on a huge standing army rather than feeding its own people or engaging diplomatically, the “drip-feeding” by the West will be its only sustaining option.
An astute work that examines all facets of this Orwellian state.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78032-947-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Zed Books
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
PERSPECTIVES
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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