Of interest to political trend watchers—and a warning to Democrats not to take the Latino vote for granted.
A survey of changing political trends among Latino American constituencies over the last half-century.
Hispanics are not born Democrats, although they have trended that way in the last several elections. It seems likely that they’ll do so in 2020, if only because of the current president’s anti-immigrant and nativist rhetoric. Still, Northwestern University professor Cadava points out, Hispanics voted for him “by a slightly wider margin than the percentage of Hispanics who voted for establishment candidates such as John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.” The author rightly observes that the Hispanic population is not monolithic: Mexicans, Cubans, Central Americans, and Puerto Ricans bring different cultural sensibilities to the table. Cubans who left their native country because of opposition to Fidel Castro are far more likely to vote Republican, for instance, than Mexican farmworkers in the Southwest, and though most are at least nominally Catholic, both progressive and conservative elements in the Hispanic population can cite church teachings to back their political views. Cadava looks back at the days when Hispanic support was strongest for Republican candidates, as with the Latinos con Eisenhower organization and its follow-up, Latinos con Goldwater, which enjoyed reasonable success because of Goldwater’s determined courtship of Cuban Americans and Mexican Americans. Even Nixon had a so-called “Brown Mafia,” though it relied for support on “doling out government grants and contracts, dangling appointments in front of prominent Hispanics, cutting deals with some of the Chicano movement’s leaders, and efforts to suppress support for McGovern.” Other Republicans have been more worthy of that support—Gerald Ford, for instance, who expanded the Voting Rights Act to include ballots and other election materials written in Spanish. As for the present, Cadava ventures that Hispanic supporters of Trump believe that while he’s “unrefined,” he’s not a racist.
Of interest to political trend watchers—and a warning to Democrats not to take the Latino vote for granted. (8-page color insert)Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-294634-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
