A formally inventive, lyrical, feminist analysis of Chile’s famous female murderers.
A Chilean author reconstructs the details of four significant 20th-century murders orchestrated by Chilean women.
Trabucco Zerán begins with the case of Corina Rojas, an upper-class housewife who hired a man named Alberto Duarte to kill her husband, David Díaz Muñoz, to escape a “loveless marriage” in which she felt like the “victim of a miserly and unfaithful husband.” The author continues with the case of news vendor Rosa Faúndez Cavieres, who murdered her husband, Efraín Santander, and then carved his corpse into multiple pieces in a futile attempt to hide the body. Next is María Carolina Geel, who shot her lover in broad daylight at the Hotel Crillón. Trabucco Zerán ends with María Teresa Alfaro, a live-in nanny who murdered her employer’s children and mother. The cases occurred in 1916, 1923, 1955, and 1963, respectively, spanning the 20th century. Rather than further sensationalizing these crimes, the author uses these women’s action—and, perhaps more importantly, the public reaction to their stories—to reflect on society’s shifting attitudes about gender, anger, violence, and the law. “Their crimes, while disturbing, are a privileged window from which to observe how the very meaning of womanhood has changed over time,” she writes. “Their contradictions and failures act as a mirror, reflecting back typically ‘un-feminine’ emotions.” Interspersed with cogent feminist analyses of the crimes and the public and media reactions of the time, Trabucco Zerán includes diary entries describing her personal experience with the research, infusing the book with a fascinating memoirlike quality and rendering the narrative voice both personal and relatable: “I had to doubt the word of lawyers and doctors, question the sensationalism of reporters, take novel plots with a pinch of salt, and slowly learn that a question is often a veiled accusation.” Throughout, the language is both precise and evocative, and the author’s evaluation of the various circumstances is readable, trenchant, and intersectional.
A formally inventive, lyrical, feminist analysis of Chile’s famous female murderers.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-56689-633-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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 Yorker staff 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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