A carefully constructed, righteously angry investigation.
First-rate reportage of a political murder that “wasn’t supposed to happen in the Mexico of Vicente Fox.”
Digna Ochoa y Plácido, a 37-year-old attorney, had been feted by Hollywood stars and East Coast liberals for her determined work in exposing violations of civil rights on the part of the Mexican government and military and the paramilitary death and narcotics-trafficking squads that worked alongside and for them. Diebel, onetime Mexico City correspondent for the Toronto Star, reveals that Ochoa had personal as well as political reasons for her interest in exposing their crimes: She had been kidnapped and raped in Veracruz, only days after discovering a blacklist of union organizers and political activists in the office of the state attorney general. But she was a committed democrat, too, and her investigations evidently hit home, for Ochoa was murdered, shot point-blank in the head, in October 2001. The job was professional. She had been tracked and killed away from her home, and her murderer knew just who she was, leaving behind a note threatening her fellow human-rights activists: “You sons of bitches, if you keep it up we’re going to screw another one of you too.” The new government of President Vicente Fox, friend of George Bush and ostensible reformer and outside-the-system type, did nothing. Fox refused even to acknowledge that a crime had taken place. His attorney general—a former senior officer in the military—did not act; in time, the official explanation was that Ochoa died by suicide, never mind the forensic evidence to the contrary. Diebel patiently explores all these cover-ups and deceptions. Her conclusions will not surprise anyone who knows Mexico, where the military is the strongest branch of organized crime, but they will astonish readers unaware that our neighbor to the south is far from a democracy.
A carefully constructed, righteously angry investigation.Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7867-1753-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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