Though sometimes a chore to read, Nadeau’s book makes for a useful work of advocacy, calling attention to a terrible traffic...
Journalistic account of the sex trade that runs from the west coast of Africa to the southern coast of Italy and beyond.
American journalist Nadeau, author of an earlier account of the Italian trial of American murder suspect Amanda Knox (Angel Face, 2010), turns her attention to the Camorra, or Calabrian Mafia, and their engagements with the drug and arms trades, which in turn net them human cargo: young women from Nigeria and other African countries, recruited at home and promised livelihoods in Europe, then smuggled into Italy on overcrowded, easily shipwrecked boats. Reports Nadeau, “in 2016, eleven thousand Nigerian women and girls arrived in Italy on those boats.” There they were collected and put to work in the mob-controlled prostitution industry, with no way out. It does not help that Nigerian women can claim asylum easily by saying that they are threatened by Boko Haram, nor that the immigration authorities “may even know that [a woman] is being trafficked and forced to sell sex against her will, but they still look away.” Church-based and other nongovernmental agencies have stepped in but have been overwhelmed so that few women are intercepted as they land and can be guided into applying for safe asylum away from Camorra control. “They have to work fast,” writes the author, “because the traffickers are waiting in the refugee camps to ferry the girls to their madams, often within the first week of their arrival.” The book, built on interviews with many participants, is well-reported and consistently heartbreaking yet occasionally repetitive. Moreover, the author drops threads only to pick them up later, slowed by too much attention to minor detail (“Some men stop on motorcycles. The teenage boys who stop are invariably riding mopeds”).
Though sometimes a chore to read, Nadeau’s book makes for a useful work of advocacy, calling attention to a terrible traffic in human misery.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78607-255-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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