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MAÑANA FOREVER?

MEXICO AND THE MEXICANS

A distinguished scholar charts the many contradictions that shape and afflict Mexico.

After 500 years of authoritarian rule, Mexico has a burgeoning middle class and a functioning, if creaky, representative democracy, but its civil society remains perilously weak. Indeed, Castañeda (Politics and Latin American Studies/New York Univ.; Ex Mex: From Migrants to Immigrants, 2008, etc.) argues, the very cultural traits which may have permitted the people to survive their tortured history now serve to obstruct progress and stand in the way of Mexico’s full entry into modernity. He identifies a number of these characteristic features, explains their origins and the consequences they have wrought and discusses the hurdles they pose for the country’s future. Mexico, he argues, is plagued by a valorization of the individual and a persistent mistrust of collective action, a penchant for embracing victimhood, a tendency to avoid conflict and confrontation, a mistrust of competition, an obsession with past oppression and betrayals, a tolerance of corruption, an exaltation of ritual over reality and a xenophobia embedded even in law. As he takes the measure of his native land, Castañeda relies on three sources of information: “the classics”—the best that has been written by knowledgeable observers of Mexico—an abundance of statistical information, and his considerable personal experience. The delivery of so much political, economic and sociological data, while a necessary component of his analysis, can sometimes make for slow going, and he frequently assumes a greater understanding of Mexico’s recent politics than most Americans, at least, surely possess. Still, his anecdotes are lively, and he makes judicious use of the experts he frequently invokes. Perhaps Mexicans will heed Castañeda’s prescription for reform, including, for example, instituting a national police force and criminal code and his call for a new respect for the rule of law. There’s an underlying pessimism to his argument, but he can’t help offering reasons for hope. An informed, persuasive analysis of the attitudinal adjustments and concrete changes required for Mexico to thrive in the 21st century.

 

Pub Date: May 17, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-375-40424-5

Page Count: 286

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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