Avowing there is much misinterpretation of these terrible events from both sides, Guardiola-Rivera invites a deeper,...
A tangled yet tender study of the revolutionary forces, both leftist and rightist, that converged in Chile during the turbulent 1960s and wrought a political miracle and tragedy.
The election of socialist Salvador Allende to the presidency of Chile in 1970 proved a stunning vindication for the people’s democracy movement in Latin America, as well as a shock to the Cold War–weary United States, terrified that it had another Cuba in its backyard. Guardiola-Rivera (Birkbeck, Univ. of London; What If Latin America Ruled the World?, 2010, etc.) plunges passionately into the construction of what Allende and his followers and colleagues such as Pablo Neruda called la vía chilena, the Chilean Way, defined as a “peaceful transformation of the state” by legal, constitutional means, a deep commitment to building a coalition of all levels of society, including indigenous peoples, agrarian reform, nationalization of industry and banking for the equal distribution of wealth, and a repudiation of violence as business as usual. Building the “revolution from below” took decades and a careful grass-roots movement, as the author argues, that involved returning to enlightenment ideals of the 19th century that had been shunted aside by U.S. imperialist aims in the region since the turn of the century. At the same time, the far right gathered strength from the fascist model of the Spanish Civil War, and the large corporate interests sought help from the U.S. government, which helped strangle Allende’s economic measures in boycotts and sanctions. This allowed the military, handed to Gen. Augusto Pinochet by Allende himself, to wait and see which way the wind was blowing. The author gives a truly chilling account of Allende’s last hours under bombing at his palace.
Avowing there is much misinterpretation of these terrible events from both sides, Guardiola-Rivera invites a deeper, intellectual look inside.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60819-896-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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 Yorkerstaff 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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