From frequent Atlantic contributor Langewiesche—a former pilot who worked the Texas-Mexico border—a terse, clear, tough- minded account of life on both sides of the line. (The title— jargon used by customs officials on Arizona's O'odham Indian reservation—means searching for and reading the tracks of immigrants and drug-runners.) Langewiesche begins and ends his journey in the tense little Texan border town of Marfa (named, improbably, for a character in The Brothers Karamazov), where he lived for years. In between, he travels the line from Tijuana in the west all the way east to Brownsville/Matamoros on the Gulf of Mexico. He describes the waves of immigrants coming across to San Diego; the futile efforts of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to slow the traffic north; INS racism and brutality; the corruption, on both sides of the border, of law-enforcement officials protecting and profiting from the drug trade; the horrendous working and living conditions in Juarez and Matamoros as US business invests heavily in maquilas, the assembly plants where Mexico workers make less in a day than US workers make in an hour. Langewiesche sketches memorable portraits of unsung heroes and saints, Mexican and American, working to protect the rights of ``illegales'' in California or of fellow workers—mostly women, mostly young—in the maquilas. A little more Mexican history and culture, a greater sense of what's destroyed back home when Oaxaca villagers pick up and move north, would have given tragic depth to Langewiesche's report. Still, the author shows us the appalling human reality behind business-page slogans and shibboleths—NAFTA, the global economy, the free market—and he makes the border itself look as arbitrary, strange, and inevitable as the Berlin Wall in its day. And of equal geopolitical significance. Compassionate, risk-taking reporting: timely and valuable.
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41113-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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