A rich mosaic of culture, history, economics, and politics. (180 b&w photos, 16 pages color, not seen)
A comprehensive, generously illustrated chronicle of Mexican history from conqueror Cortés to singer Selena.
Following their lucid introduction, editors Meyer (History/Univ. of Arizona) and Beezley (History/Univ. of Arizona) divide their engaging text into five major chronological sections, offering a total of 20 essays written by an impressive cast of experts on a wide variety of subjects. They begin with an analysis of the 16th-century Spanish customs and cultural assumptions that Cortés and his men brought with them to the New World. A fine chapter on the native Mayan, Aztec, and other Mesoamerican cultures follows. Next is a description of the collision of the two worlds that reveals how Cortés was able to succeed against sheer numbers because of his ability to divide the Indians politically. Subsequent chapters deal with the growth of New Spain, the uniquely Mexican character that Catholicism assumed in the region (“the combination of African and native traditions led to interesting religious forms”), and the struggle for Mexican independence (achieved in1821). Although Meyer and Beezley maintain a steady chronological progression, they also offer chapters on such subjects as disease and ecology, relations with the US, and the arts (especially interesting are the accounts of Diego Rivera and of Mexico’s other celebrated muralists). All the contributors are particularly adept at viewing well-known events from Mexican perspectives (the Battle of the Alamo, for example, consumes barely a sentence in Christon Archer’s damning evaluation of President Santa Anna as “the principal inhabitant even today of Mexico’s black pantheon of those who failed the nation”). The disastrous 1846–48 war with the US receives its due, as do the exploits of Juárez, Maximilian, Zapata, and Villa. Later essays deal with the emergence of Mexico as a modern state and its struggles to develop an economy sufficiently robust to provide for its impoverished segments.
A rich mosaic of culture, history, economics, and politics. (180 b&w photos, 16 pages color, not seen)Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-19-511228-8
Page Count: 639
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
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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