As good a look at Mexico as has been written by outsiders since Alan Riding’s Distant Neighbors (1984), and essential for...
Superb from-the-barricades portrait of Mexico’s second revolution, which is still unfolding.
New York Times reporters Preston and Dillon offer a vivid account of matters that would have been common knowledge to American readers had newspapers or newsmagazines showed interest in our southern neighbor’s affairs: the complex transformation of a one-party system, the longest-ruling in the world, into a pluralistic democracy. In fairness to American readers, Preston and Dillon observe, the momentous process, known to Mexicans as el cambio—the change—caught many Mexicans unaware, too: “Mexico’s second revolution was accomplished so efficiently and peacefully that not many Mexicans, and even fewer outsiders, really grasped the historic dimensions of the event.” Whatever the case, the Mexican electorate ended more than 70 years of one-party rule in July 2000, turning out the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in favor of newcomer Vicente Fox’s National Action Party (PAN). The change had many agents: labor activists, the disaffected urban poor, supporters of the Zapatista rebel movement, middle-class intellectuals, ordinary citizens shocked by corruption and the brutality of the police and military. It also had an unlikely ally in PRI president and party leader Ernesto Zedillo, who, like Mikhail Gorbachev (to whom he has been likened), bowed to the inevitable and accepted the will of the people—even if many party stalwarts, and their American hireling James Carville, did not. Though Fox, who won 43 percent of the vote in a three-way race, has been a disappointment—so Preston and Dillon conclude—the awakening has made all the difference: “It soon became obvious that [Fox’s] victory would not bring prosperity, equality, and justice overnight. . . . But nobody seriously questioned the essential vigor of the democracy Mexicans had constructed, and the country’s peaceful transition remained a source of pride.”
As good a look at Mexico as has been written by outsiders since Alan Riding’s Distant Neighbors (1984), and essential for students of Latin American affairs.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-22668-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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