A book of promises and projections that, now that López Obrador has proved victorious, becomes a checklist for action.
"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 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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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