It’s a huge business, drugs, drug-fueled revolution, and singing about them, and Wald does a superb job of taking his...
A fascinating journey south and north of the border on the trail of songs about marijuana, cocaine, and Monica Lewinsky.
“Though the Anglo media act as if the current Latin music boom were driven by Afro-Caribbean styles like salsa and merengue,” writes music journalist and blues historian Wald (River of Song, 1999), “Mexican bands account for roughly two-thirds of domestic Latin record sales.” And while there are plenty of Mexican rock, folk, jazz, and even rap acts, the bulk of those sales are in the norteño genre, Mexico’s equivalent of country music, which mixes elements of Central European polka and German oom-pah-pah with flamenco and other Spanish-born styles. A norteño staple is the corrido, a longish folk ballad often celebrating the exploits of Robin Hood–like bandits, revolutionary heroes, and other outlaws. Lately Mexican artists have taken to updating their subjects to include Zapatista guerrillas, drug smugglers, and other figures taken from the daily headlines; one group in particular, Los Tigres del Norte, with whose members Wald spends much time in these pages, has made a lucrative specialty of celebrating the very people American law enforcement has pledged to eliminate. That drugs should be such a popular theme is no surprise, according to Wald, for all of Mexico is awash in contraband and dependent on the income it brings; one resident of the city of Culiacán tells him, “There are only three wealthy families here that have no drug connections in their history . . . and that number is not just symbolic or poetic license.” That’s all well and good, the composers reply; did not the Kennedys, who also figure in corridos, make their fortune bootlegging and then investing in legal enterprises?
It’s a huge business, drugs, drug-fueled revolution, and singing about them, and Wald does a superb job of taking his readers into that world.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-621024-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Rayo/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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