Essential, lively reading for anyone wishing to understand Mexico and contemporary geopolitics alike.
Superb history of a nation that deserves far more recognition on the international stage than it receives.
“Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.” So lamented Porfirio Díaz, the Mexican leader who “reelected himself seven times” while demanding strict term limits for any political figure other than himself. Yet, as Northwestern University historian Gillingham notes, Díaz was an agent of his own downfall, having eventually run afoul of “two of the elemental forces in Mexican political culture: the goal of representative local government, and the hatred of caciques who impeded it.” Gillingham notes that Mexico has always seen a strong revolutionary streak, from one of the very first Spanish arrivals, Gonzalo Guerrero, who was shipwrecked on the coast in 1511 and soon helped lead an anti-Spanish rebellion among the Maya people who took him in. The Spanish who followed were conquistadors and entrepreneurs, power players all, but also, preeminently, they were settlers, “coming to the New World to found towns and stay” and, in time, forging a people who represented “the world’s greatest melting pot,” with Europeans, Africans, Asians, and Indigenous peoples all contributing to the mix. Granted, to get there, the Spanish killed an awful lot of people; as Gillingham notes, one priest described the effects of an epidemic among the Native peoples, who “died in heaps, like bedbugs.” Violence has also been a strong presence in Mexico—and the author does a great service to confront head-on the near-military dictatorship that flourished in the late 1960s and 1970s, when, just as in Argentina and Chile, leftists were massacred: “Between 1974 and 1980 the army began disappearing people by throwing them out of airplanes over the Pacific.” Still, as Gillingham also notes, Mexico is in many ways more democratic today than its northern neighbor, thanks to the efforts of “the peoples who made the first truly global society.”
Essential, lively reading for anyone wishing to understand Mexico and contemporary geopolitics alike.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780802164841
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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 Yorkerstaff 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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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