A youthful, likable, irrepressible voice for the new Promised Land.
Jazzy, energetic work by Arellano (¡Ask a Mexican!, 2007, etc.), who alternately builds and deconstructs the mythology of the southern California county he calls home—as do lots of other Mexican-Americans, immigrants legal and illegal, and rich white Republicans.
In 1918, the author’s grandfather and great-grandfather ventured north from El Cargadero, Mexico, to Anaheim, Calif. Many other cargaderenses followed suit, working as fruit pickers and enduring measly wages and ugly racism to establish themselves and even to thrive. But King Citrus had quietly died by the 1950s, as a landscape once dominated by cattle ranches and orange groves was covered by tract houses and Disneyland’s fantasy architecture. One thing didn’t change—the conservatism of old-guard ranchers and farmers, happily adopted by the newly arrived developers and businessmen. “In those early days, Orange County conservatives wrote the guidebook for the GOP’s modern-day success,” Arellano sourly notes, recalling Ronald Reagan’s famous quip, “It’s nice to be in Orange County, where the good Republicans go to die.” Despite OC’s substantial minority population, county leaders have spawned some of the most repugnant anti-immigration measures in the country. The author alternates his sarcastically inflected social history with the engaging personal tale of growing up in Anaheim. Attending the local public schools, he felt torn between wanting to assimilate and being true to his mexicanidad. To avoid becoming a pocho (a Mexican who has lost his heritage), he learned to dance and wear a proper tejana (Stetson) like his trucker father. Finding his Mexican voice in politics proved the key to Arellano’s American success. A tongue-in-cheek letter to the editor praising anti-immigrant activist Barbara Coe as “the matriarch of the OC Latinos” led to freelance gigs with the OC Weekly and the realization that journalism was the career for him. His genre-bending narrative trips along from John Wayne to the hip new TV shows set in OC, and even offers a guidebook-style breakdown of each OC town and its best restaurant.
A youthful, likable, irrepressible voice for the new Promised Land.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4004-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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