"Confronted with Trump’s orders to persecute migrants, we must join together to denounce his human rights violations”: Mexico’s president-elect delivers a few choice words for his counterpart north of the border.
In this collection of campaign-trail speeches and articles, leftist politician López Obrador offers a program for—well, making Mexico great again, inasmuch as a long reign of neoliberalism has left it “one of the poorest countries on the continent.” One of the effects is that Mexico’s rural poor have had to look to the north for jobs, which in turn has occasioned the rise of nativist politics in the U.S. When candidate Trump thundered that Mexico wasn’t “sending their best,” the author gained a convenient foil, accusing Trump of ignorance and demagoguery. “Mexico does not ‘send’ anyone to the United States,” he writes, adding that the Mexican and U.S. economies are so closely bound that protectionist policies will only harm American consumers, to say nothing of the elites who supported Trump. On a more purely domestic note, López Obrador holds that corruption is “Mexico’s central problem” and pledges to uproot it. Moreover, he adds by way of a promise that he must now fulfill, by 2024—the end of his six-year term—a less corrupt Mexico will have posted a 6 percent growth rate, while “we will have created a new way of thinking, a revolution in conscience that will prevent avarice, corruption, and greed from prevailing over truth, morality, and fraternity.” The high-flown rhetoric notwithstanding—and a cynic might observe that such fine words have been heard before from a governing class that the author calls "a gang of plunderers”—López Obrador gets down to cases with table-heavy pieces showing how former presidents soak the system with fat pensions and protections, how net migration flows have operated in the last 50 years, and the like.
A book of promises and projections that, now that López Obrador has proved victorious, becomes a checklist for action.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-944869-85-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: OR Books
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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