by Monica Muñoz Martinez ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 3, 2018
Timely and of considerable interest to students of borderlands history as well as of sociology.
Scholarly account of the long history of ethnic violence along the Texas-Mexico borderlands.
In 1915 and 1916, a time of revolutionary upheaval in Mexico, when refugees were streaming across the border, Texas Rangers and American soldiers declared open season on ethnic Mexicans in a time known as the “bandit wars.” During that yearlong campaign, writes Martinez (American Studies and Ethnic Studies/Brown Univ.), as many as 300 ethnic Mexicans were murdered—so many that “farmers raised concerns because their field laborers were fleeing to Mexico.” Those Mexicans who remained performed a difficult calculus: when to travel, whom to hide from, whom to deal with. Meanwhile, the Texas Rangers, never known as an ecumenical organization, rewarded the criminalization of Mexicans and the murderousness of recruits, such as one fervent believer in deadly force whose “methods for ‘handling’ ethnic Mexicans and African Americans earned praise from his supervising officers.” Indeed, a contemporary account suggests, applicants to join the force need have only a single qualification: “that they had previously worked as gunmen and killed ethnic Mexicans.” In an account that sometimes strays into academic aridity and postmodern tropism (“vernacular histories that lament anti-Mexican violence open new opportunities to recover marginalized histories”), Martinez explores a terrible history that reverberates today not only because of family memory and local curation (including a small-town Dairy Queen with a display of photographs of lynched Mexicans), but also because so many of its particulars seem taken from current headlines as refugees continue to die in the desert. The author closes by drawing close connections between migrants killed at the border by American law enforcement officials today with those who died a century ago, such as “Concepción García in 1919, shot and killed by a US soldier while crossing the Rio Grande, returning to Mexico from school in Texas.”
Timely and of considerable interest to students of borderlands history as well as of sociology.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-674-97643-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Share your opinion of this book
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
Awards & Accolades
Likes
18
Our Verdict
GET IT
Google Rating
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2016
New York Times Bestseller
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.