Smart, thoughtful reporting from the trenches.
A harrowing look at the gang violence that grips Honduras.
Criminal justice scholar Halperin began to travel to Honduras a decade ago, tracking the work of a group called the Association for a More Just Society. Located in a Tegucigalpa ghetto, ASJ “had been doing a hodgepodge of heartwarming but unspectacular good works like helping poor families procure land titles and helping abused wives get divorced.” But now the group was turning to a far more fraught project, namely battling a gang that terrorized the 50,000 people of Nueva Suyapa. Improbably, one leader, called Chelito, was just 12 years old, but he was harder than most death row inmates: “Part of his legend was the way he consistently yo-yoed from the barrio to police custody and back, as though he were the Honduran Houdini.” Carlos del Cid, an evangelist who, with American sociologist Kurt Ver Beek, founded ASJ, knew Chelito, “one of the many kids Carlos tried to steer away from street life,” but that was no protection. Indeed, for just that reason, ASJ morphed from a Christian social service agency to a squad of crimefighters, a curious transformation with an understandable backstory: Hondurans were afraid to inform on the thousands of gang members who lived among them, the police and courts were corrupt, and if justice were to be served it would have to be done by local people themselves, providing evidence and testimony. Small wonder that so many Hondurans are desperate to leave their homeland for safety in Mexico and the U.S., fleeing a country whose very president was likely involved in the drug trade, which in no way makes him “an outlier within the uppermost echelons of Honduran politics.” Del Cid and Ver Beek, conversely, are clear outliers, but, Halperin concludes, “their two-plus decades of all-in altruism, all-in courage, and all-in faith have not gotten them anywhere close to a satisfying conclusion.”
Smart, thoughtful reporting from the trenches.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9781324090786
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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