An affecting, timely book that would have benefited from tighter editing and a less scattered narrative structure.
A mix of memoir and deep research into various Mexican and American political immigration issues, exploring complications of life on both sides of the border.
Although the narrative is wide-ranging, Corchado (Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter’s Journey Through a Country’s Descent into Darkness, 2013), the Border-Mexico correspondent for the Dallas Morning News, organizes it loosely around the “four friends” of the title: the author, a Mexican-born, mostly U.S.–educated journalist; a Mexican-born immigrant owner of a Mexican restaurant in Philadelphia; a Mexican-born political activist splitting time between the neighboring nations; and a politically connected lawyer born as a U.S. citizen in the state of New Mexico. In 1987, during the early years of their careers, the four men, feeling isolated in Philadelphia, met and discussed their life situations, and they never lost touch. The saga of each man is intriguing, but the narrative is least compelling when Corchado devotes too much space to his companions. The book is most compelling when he focuses on the memoir part of the story, including how his parents reluctantly departed Mexico hoping to find a richer life north of the border. A secondary, equally compelling narrative involves Corchado’s evolution as a journalist. Studying the subject at a geographically remote university in El Paso, Texas, the author never dreamed that his talent and ethnic diversity would lead to employment at the Philadelphia bureau of the Wall Street Journal. Because Corchado’s professional passion centered on illuminating life along the U.S.–Mexico border, he left the Journal for his dream assignment at the Morning News. (He would go on to earn multiple prizes and fellowships for his work.) Naturally, given the devastating narcotics-related violence in both nations, the author offers insights into drug policy, which is intimately tied into border security and both legal and illegal immigration.
An affecting, timely book that would have benefited from tighter editing and a less scattered narrative structure.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63286-554-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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