Race, cocaine, politics, and corruption all figure in this portrayal of a violent showdown in 1980 Miami.
Miami-based journalist Griffin employs his trade with gusto in this deeply investigated account of real American carnage at the height of the drug war. The narrative begins with the death of Arthur McDuffie, a black former Marine who was killed by police after a high-speed chase. The events that follow would have massive ramifications. Rather than simply depicting the big picture, the author zeroes in on three critical figures to parse the tumult from different points of view: Edna Buchanan was the Miami Herald crime reporter who not only fielded the murder investigation, but unearthed the vein of corruption and police brutality inside the department. Inside the police force, we meet Capt. Marshall Frank, the lead investigator, who characterized the McDuffie case as a “jigsaw puzzle.” Charged with uniting the city in the face of multiple crises was Mayor Maurice Ferré, who engaged the media, the tourist industry, and the city’s powerful businessmen to help a simmering city that was on the verge of falling apart. Two other factors added dynamite to the bonfire. One was the infamous Mariel boatlift, during which Fidel Castro attempted to rid his country of criminals, patients in insane asylums, troublesome activists, and other “antisocial elements” by dumping 125,000 Cuban refugees into the state of Florida. The other was the relatively new phenomenon of cocaine smuggling, which added significantly to both the proliferation of corruption and the city’s crime rate, especially violent crimes. This is a series of stories that have been depicted in other books and publications, but Griffin’s engrossing use of primary sources and cogent analyses of how all the pieces fit together results in a propulsive story about the dangerous ways people learn to live together.
An engrossing, peek-between-your-fingers history of an American city on the edge.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9102-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
Categories: HISTORY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | TRUE CRIME
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Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
Categories: FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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