Earnestly reported material skewed (however compassionately) to place the plight of autonomous emigrants above American...
An impassioned, heavy-handed testimony on the state of the U.S.-Mexican border wars.
A staunch human rights advocate, veteran journalist Eichstaedt (Above the Din of War: Afghans Speak About Their Lives, Their Country, and Their Future—and Why America Should Listen, 2013, etc.) traveled to the Southwest borderlands to report on the drug and immigration troubles marking Mexico as “terra incognita.” There, he met humanitarian groups like the Tucson Samaritans, who are responsible for randomly dropping food and water rations for illegal immigrants crossing the desert. These migrants, the author notes, fall prey to the systematic and corporeal processes of U.S. Border Patrol, a government body employing technologically advanced territorial surveillance including aerostat drones and night-vision telescoped Humvees, all of which Eichstaedt perceives as excessive and wasteful. A section on the Columbus, N.M., gun-smuggling scandal involving town officials further demonstrates the area’s historic potential for violence and corruption. Often a circuitous route, Mexican citizens who choose to abandon their country find themselves at the mercy of greedy “coyotes” (paid border guides/human smugglers), vicious “desert bandits” and drug cartel assassins. The author bolsters his astute reportage with interviews with migrants desperate for American opportunities, controversial border control crusaders, politicians and law enforcement agents. He also provides a fascinating tour of Tucson’s Border Patrol offices and their complex surveillance of various ports of entry. As philanthropic as his perspective edge may be throughout the text, Eichstaedt rarely mentions that undocumented border breaches remain fundamentally unlawful. A dogmatic final chapter further criticizes modern border-protection tactics and statistical assumptions while promoting a “sweeping guest worker visa program” and an appeal for the reconsideration of current immigration policies.
Earnestly reported material skewed (however compassionately) to place the plight of autonomous emigrants above American territorial laws.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61374-836-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
bookshelf
