An often engaging fusion of Chicana realism and Aztec mythologizing that ultimately lacks weight.
Novelist and poet Castillo (Father Was a Toltec, 1995, etc.) combines her arts in this “novel in verse.”
This book should be dedicated to Tezcatlipoca, the god of “Double Meanings.” In keeping with her two-gender title and hybrid genre, Castillo tells paired stories of Ella and an unnamed first-person narrator, both bilingual Mexicans who have worked the last two decades in low-paying jobs in El Norte. Brown-skinned and small-bodied Amazons, they use wit and cleverness as arrows to puncture the pretenses, and to halt the advances, of dull men such as the do-gooding “Righteous White Boyz,” “The Seminarian” and “Bill-with-the-Baggage.” A mother as a teenager, Ella loves women and gay men best. The narrator loves Ella for her unsuspected beauty, her watercolors and her persistence. Initially doubles, these plucky border women turn out to be the same person, whole in the end. Castillo knows the economic and psychological deprivations of immigrant workers and gay minorities, and includes a chapter on the murders of women laboring in Juárez factories, a horror recently covered by the American press. But Ella’s plotless sexual adventures, the narrator’s digressions and the short lines of Castillo’s conversational triplet stanzas—along with the uncertain identities of Ella and the narrator—keep the reader at an emotional distance.
An often engaging fusion of Chicana realism and Aztec mythologizing that ultimately lacks weight.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-931896-20-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Curbstone Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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
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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