An assured popular history of cross-border turmoil that inaugurated more than 75 years of US intervention in Latin American affairs—and that produced lasting resentment in our neighbors to the south. Eisenhower—son of the late President and an accomplished military historian (So Far from God, 1989, etc.)—covers an entire tumultuous decade in Mexican history, 1910-20, when a succession of Mexican politicians, warlords, and outlaws squabbled over land reform and the spoils of power. The author traces US involvement in the struggle back to Woodrow Wilson's revulsion toward General Victoriano Huerta, who in 1913 overthrew the ineffectual reformer Francisco Madero and ordered his assassination. Wilson's disinclination toward saber-rattling was soon overcome by his father-knows-best moralism (as he once told a British interviewer: ``I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!''). His patience snapped by the failure of the diplomatic ``watchful waiting'' he hoped would lead to Huerta's ouster, Wilson ordered the US Atlantic Fleet to occupy Mexico's major seaport, Veracruz, a year later. In 1916, he followed up by dispatching General John Pershing to capture Mexican bandit Pancho Villa, who'd raided the town of Columbus, New Mexico, partly to avenge US recognition of Huerta's successor—and Villa's foe—Venustiano Carranza. Outrage flared in Mexico over these infringements of sovereignty, and only with difficulty did Carranza and Wilson manage to damp the anger that they themselves had kindled. While Eisenhower pictures most of the Americans involved as heedless to the consequences of the invasion, he depicts the Mexicans (including the often romanticized Emiliano Zapata) mostly as corrupt, ruthless, or both. If there's a hero in this telling, it's Pershing: unbowed before adversity (he'd recently lost his wife and children in a fire), willing to share his men's privations, preparing for his imminent WW I glory. A colorful introduction to a landmark period in US-Latin relations. (Illustrations)
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03573-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
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 Yorker staff 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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