A deeply affecting eyewitness account of a despicable period in Chilean history.
Former Chilean president Lagos lucidly recounts the extraordinary efforts to end the Pinochet dictatorship and lead the country to truth and reckoning.
The author was a protégé and colleague of Salvador Allende, the socialist president of Chile who was just three years into his term when a CIA-backed coup led by Pinochet precipitated Allende’s suicide during the storming of the presidential palace in 1973. Lagos was brought up in middle-class Santiago by his pianist and teacher mother; he was educated in left-wing politics and economics in the mid-’50s, and he received his doctorate at Duke University and became an academic. The work during Allende’s administration to render Chile a more just, equal society was shattered by the Pinochet dictatorship, which favored the neoliberal economics theory of the “Chicago Boys,” who advocated open markets and deregulation. Pinochet used economics as his ideological weapon, privatizing, deregulating, arresting labor activists, opening markets and inviting in private investors, thereby creating huge profits for the dictator and his cronies. After the initial economic success (used as a model by Margaret Thatcher and others), the exacerbation of the inequity between rich and poor and the ongoing repression of all opposition began to corrode Chilean society. As a result, Lagos and other idealists attempted to restructure the country’s socialist thought. By the mid-’80s, the Democratic Alliance became the first real challenge to Pinochet and was able to crack the prevailing fear and win the plebiscite in 1988, forcing Pinochet to step down. Because of the truth commissions advocated by Lagos and others, the enormity of Pinochet’s crimes were revealed.
A deeply affecting eyewitness account of a despicable period in Chilean history.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-230-33816-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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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