Marvelously nuanced reflections on a nation “in constant motion.”
The accomplished journalist and author, who has lived in Japan for more than 30 years, pursues the elusive Japanese character.
With an elegant, understated manner, Iyer (Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells, 2019, etc.) offers poignant reflections on his adopted country and its maddening contradictions and shifting parts. He moves from the public to the private realms, ambling among themes such as travel, dress, animism, language, role-playing, and playing ball. He often inserts a quote that has nothing to do with Japan but that sizes up the place and sense perfectly—e.g., he cites Oscar Wilde, who “saw the folds within emotions and knew that social life was a theater where the emotions are very real.” Iyer’s subtle observations reveal a great deal about what is beyond the surface of how some Westerners view the Japanese—“as robots,” which the author explains to be “less because the Japan are so machinelike and dependable than because inanimate things in Japan possess so much spirit and life.” Iyer marvels at the “culture of shared obedience” and service; at the country’s astonishing number of vending machines and every imaginable kind of convenience store; and at the company called Family Romance, which employs 1,400 actors “to be family members for clients who are going through hard times.” Being in Japan reminded the author of his time visiting West Point Military Academy: “the courtesy, the sense of order—held up by an unbudging sense of hierarchy—the devotion to tradition,” and also how the cadets “were brought together into a unit…that spoke for a commitment to something larger than themselves.” Iyer also sees the troubling flip side to this “streamlined” and cooperative society, such as its exclusivity and insularity, which keep it “out of step with the larger global community,” especially in its treatment of women, outsiders, and minorities.
Marvelously nuanced reflections on a nation “in constant motion.”Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49395-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
HISTORY | MODERN | 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
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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