A potent book that readers won’t soon forget, and a warning of what can come of an insatiable market that knows no borders.
GQ and Mother Jones contributing editor Bowden (Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future, 2009, etc.) digs into the complexities behind the ominous escalation of violence in Ciudad Juárez, a city across the border from El Paso that now has the tragic distinction of being the most dangerous city in the world.
In 2006, shortly after his controversial election, Mexican President Felipe Calderón, whom half of the nation considers illegitimate, declared war on the region’s drug cartels. He sent thousands of federal troops to Juárez’s state of Chihuahua, vowing to hunt down the leaders of the major drug distributors. At the same time, women in Juárez began to disappear, and their decomposing bodies began turning up in shallow graves in the desert. The disturbing trend was echoed by a simultaneous increase in rape and domestic violence in all of Juárez’s social strata. For the city’s unskilled labor force, the primary alternative to the drug business is a job in a maquila, whose ultra-low wages assure manufacturers from El Norte cheap production of goods for the global economy. Add to the mix a local police force willing to sell its guns to the highest bidder, and you have the makings of a potentially viral social disaster. Bowden began following the murders in March 2008. Before long, they outpaced his ability to contextualize them. Were they all drug-related? How many were committed for revenge or just the thrill of it by killers taking advantage of the growing lawlessness? Were the cartels behind them, or the police? Or the army, charged with restoring order? Straightforward answers elude the author, as they do nearly every observer—the city’s journalists, who are challenged to report on crimes without inciting killers to come after them; the social workers who deal with the human detritus who survive the violence; even a reformed sicario (assassin) who can only lovingly relate the gruesome details of his former craft but is clueless about who ordered his services or why. Bowden uses his tremendous talents to tell a haunting, darkly poetic story of a city’s horrifying descent into madness and anarchy.
A potent book that readers won’t soon forget, and a warning of what can come of an insatiable market that knows no borders.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56858-449-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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