Urrea returns to the setting of his well-received first book, Across the Wire (not reviewed), for another look at the impact of NAFTA on the lives of those who live in the direst poverty on the US-Mexico border. Urrea was born in Tijuana, the son of a Mexican police official and an American mother. As he wryly observes, ``The border runs down the middle of me.'' Fluently bilingual, he is unusually well equipped to write about the town of his birth and the border area it bestrides. Although he readily admits that there are many parts of Tijuana that are not characterized by the squalor of which he writes, he is drawn once again to the lowest of the low, the basureros, the families living in cardboard boxes and makeshift shacks near the city's huge garbage dump, surviving by picking through the rubbish found there each day. The portrait of daily life that emerges is not without its familiar contours—readers of Alex Kotlowitz and Jonathan Kozol will recognize the plight of children raised in such circumstances. But there is little in the day-to-day experiences of Americans that compares to the sheer grinding misery of the lives that Urrea depicts. Yet, as his book repeatedly demonstrates, the people of the dump possess a dignity and independence that is admirable. The work of the garbage-pickers is governed by clear rules, and as the book's final chapter makes overwhelmingly clear, this is a community in the best sense, quick to give a helping hand and solicitous of its constituents. Written in no small part as a response to California's Proposition 187 and the false hopes stirred by NAFTA, the book is a stinging and impassioned answer to the anti-immigration wave cresting in American politics today.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-48419-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
How can the loss of the Chantbury Pyx, a priceless reliquary stolen from a Bath gallery, be related to the murder of Mrs. Pryce, a vicious old biddy whose complaint to Lance Tyler's private inquiry agency about flowers purloined from her garden makes it all too easy for Tyler's partner, Joanna Mackenzie, to identify her when she's struck down with a hammer? Inspector James Carrick, Joanna's former superior officer and former lover (she lost her CID job over the affair), is thunderstruck by the possibility that the same hammer may have been used in both crimes. He's struck in other, more dramatic ways as well: After a brutal attack in her home leaves Mackenzie nearly dead, Carrick, returning to the flat to check the windows, ends up joining her in sick bay. Which of Mrs. Pryce's neighbors—the sweet-toothed agoraphobe with a biker boyfriend, the boorish fan of raucous modern music, the nursing home matron whose cats have a high accident rate, the army veteran subject to blackouts, or Carrick's own retired schoolmistress—can be responsible for a series of felonies ranging from stolen flowers and poisoned cats to murder? Duffy (Who Killed Cock Robin?, 1990, etc.) etches her unlovely characters so sharply that it's a shame the plot keeps snatching you away from them just as you're getting nicely acquainted. Plucky, angry Mackenzie in particular would be well worth a sequel.
Pub Date: Dec. 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11295-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An alarming and inspiring message that will hopefully spur much-needed action.
The story of one woman’s call to ease the atrocious human suffering in the Congo.
Settling in Portland, Ore., in her late 20s, photographer Shannon thought her life was in place. Everything shifted, however, when she learned of the war and unthinkable tragedies taking place in the Congo, a conflict borne out of the Rwandan genocide that had become muted in the international community. Already running from her father’s death, she decided to run 30 miles and raise 30 sponsorships for Congolese women through Women for Women, an international NGO for female survivors of war. Hoping to spark a movement, she created a foundation called Run for Congo Women and traveled through the country to meet the women she helped sponsor. Shannon presents images of the uncensored horror stories that, to many Congolese, have become regrettably routine: Congo’s vile colonial history and the Rwandan genocide spillover that has caused the murders of more than five million Congolese people; children forced to kill and rape in their own communities; daily child deaths from easily curable illnesses; grisly murders of men and children in front of their wives and mothers; families burned alive inside their homes; women who must choose between rape and watching their children starve. The author writes from a place of determination and clarity, despair and breakdown, overwhelming love and hope. Juxtaposing brutality with beauty, Shannon’s direct prose is a stirring reminder that these horrors are real and ongoing.
An alarming and inspiring message that will hopefully spur much-needed action.Pub Date: April 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58005-296-2
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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