by Neil Foley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 8, 2014
A timely look at and appreciation of a fast-growing demographic destined to play an increasingly important role in our...
A scholar specializing in the American Southwest tells the underappreciated story of the Mexicans who have helped build America.
Hundreds of years before any Anglo crossed the Mississippi westward, Mexicans lived in the present-day American West and Southwest. Ever since, their descendants have occupied a peculiar position in our history. With more than a little justice, Chicano activists, protesting their treatment in the United States, declared during the 1960s, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” Foley (History/Southern Methodist Univ.; Quest For Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity, 2010, etc.) sets forth the genesis of Mexican America with an introductory, potted history of the Spanish conquest. He devotes more space to the border-altering U.S. land grab of a third of Mexico’s territory, first with the annexation of Texas and then with 1848’s Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The bulk of the narrative centers on the Mexican experience in America during the 20th century, the decadeslong push/pull between the United States and Mexico, the unceasing controversies over generations of legal and illegal immigrants, and the indispensability of Mexican-American labor to our economy versus the accompanying fear of the foreign. Foley’s narrative becomes too crowded with passages discussing 1942’s Zoot Suit Riot in Los Angeles, Mexican-American wartime contributions, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and ’70s and the “Decade of the Hispanic” in the ’80s. The author touches on the creation of the United Farm Workers, the “English First” movement and instances of recurring racism, ranging from the forthright “No Mexicans” signs of the 1940s to the “Frito Bandito” advertisements of the ’60s. For Americans long accustomed to understanding the country’s development as an east-to-west phenomenon, Foley’s singular service is to urge us to tilt the map south to north and to comprehend conditions as they have been for some time and will likely be for the foreseeable future.
A timely look at and appreciation of a fast-growing demographic destined to play an increasingly important role in our history.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-674-04848-5
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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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
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