Werb cuts through the desolation to get at the truth of the region’s vexing problem, but the solutions remain frustratingly...
An epidemiologist investigates the rash of female deaths in and around Tijuana.
For the past decade, Tijuana has seen a drastic uptick in crime, most notably in the deaths and suspicious disappearances of women. After completing his doctorate in epidemiology and biostatistics in 2013, Werb traveled to the city to “dive into the purgatories Tijuana could produce,” including the region’s sex trade at Zona Norte and the arid, festering River Canal area. The author began his probing examination with a visit to a needle-exchange initiative. As a white Canadian, Werb stood out as he was escorted through the toxic cityscape to meet the indigent and drug-addicted people who call the storm drainage shafts and canal tunnels home. The author’s steely focus and smooth, vivid prose make his encounters, which are often heartbreaking, come fully to life. He writes about how overdoses, murder, and rampant, untreated HIV have caused unprecedented deaths and disappearances in recent years, much akin to a surge that occurred in the late 1990s, when women vanished or were found dead by the roadsides. Illuminating the desperation of the area, Werb profiles a variety of residents—e.g., an aged sex worker participating in drug-injection studies and an elderly “shooting gallery” gatekeeper—and chronicles his collaborations with public health officials. The author also identifies known informational roadblocks, such as Tijuana’s health care bureaucracy and police and amorphous Mexican cartel syndicates. Very little of Werb’s spadework “tracking deaths backward in time” makes for easy reading, but his text shines a necessary light on Tijuana’s epidemic of “femicide” and its unrivaled drug and poverty problems. While the statistics are increasingly staggering, the author, utilizing his epidemiological expertise, was able to uncover a “new syncretic agent of death” in the form of a lethal variety of street heroin.
Werb cuts through the desolation to get at the truth of the region’s vexing problem, but the solutions remain frustratingly elusive.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63557-299-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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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