A pertinent, useful study of significant trends in the American political landscape.
An examination of how, “in the twenty-first century, American politics will be shaped, in large measure, by how Latinos are incorporated into the political system.”
A team of pollsters at public opinion research firm Latino Decisions, led by Barreto (Political Science/Univ. of Washington) and Segura (Political Science/Stanford Univ.), breaks down the Latino polity to find out who the Latinos actually are, what is important to them and why they do or do not vote for one party or the other. The most recent presidential election showed decisively how crucial the Latino voting bloc is; 1 in 10 votes cast nationwide were by Latinos, and President Barack Obama won a whopping 75 percent of the Latino vote. However, as the authors show, support for the Democrats is not so straightforward; in fact, George W. Bush won most of the Latino vote, while in some places, such as in Florida, where the Latino population is predominantly Cuban, the trend remains conservative. Latinos tend to be more liberal than whites on certain issues such as the use of “government action to solve problems,” reflecting the economic stresses within the Latino community. Moreover, Latinos have a favorable opinion of the military, support environment protection (which impacts their own vulnerable communities), tend to tolerate LBGT rights but not abortion, and have grown more Democratic since the failed immigration reform of 2006 and 2007. Latinos have coalesced as a potent political group since the passage of Arizona’s punitive Senate Bill 1070 (“the papers please” law) in April 2010 and the Republican blocking of the DREAM Act. Indeed, failure on immigration reform forced Obama to push through (the now-controversial) DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program in order to secure the disgruntled Latino bloc and win re-election. The authors offer key strategies for bringing more Latinos to the polls.
A pertinent, useful study of significant trends in the American political landscape.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1610395014
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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