Well-informed, but more of a fervent screed than a well-rounded study.
A dense chronicle of indigenous struggle in Mexico from journalist Gibler.
The author begins by noting that the Spanish conquest did not eliminate the original inhabitants, but rather subdued them. Although 90 percent of the indigenous population in Mexico perished from “violence, disease and forced labor,” 62 distinct groups survived. These groups now make up 13 percent of the total population and “continue to be the most marginalized, vulnerable, and poor sector.” The divisions among social classes in Mexico are pronounced, stemming from many barriers established from the time of Spanish rule, such as the injunction against the owning of property by indigenous groups. Today, the disenfranchisement of the poor remains embedded, as evidenced in the “gulf” Gibler carefully delineates between the wealthiest and most destitute citizens, exacerbated by recent milestones such as Carlos Salinas’s disastrous privatization schemes and signing of NAFTA. The author looks at the role of the United States in terms of its continued “economic imperialism,” which includes the displacement of people from Mexican industries and agriculture through migration, and collusion in the lucrative system of drug violence and corruption. Gibler then studies various indigenous uprisings that have sought to reclaim autonomy: in Oaxaca, where teachers took the lead in organizing demonstrations of civil disobedience in 2006; in Chiapas, where a ragtag army of indigenous insurgents called the Zapatista Army of National Liberation rebelled in 1994; and in the creation of the principality San Juan Copala in the Triqui region of Oaxaca in response to the pressure to strip the Triquis of their land. Gibler employs a murky mixture of history, personal tales of resistance, academic quotes and ardent persuasion in his rallying cry for a “radical equality of inclusion.”
Well-informed, but more of a fervent screed than a well-rounded study.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-87286-493-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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