Repetitive in detail but cumulatively very moving.
An oral history of one horrific night when busloads of unarmed students were attacked by local Mexican police.
Gibler (To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War, 2011, etc.) only presents one side, but he offers compelling testimony that there is no other side—that police attacked without provocation and the government did its best to cover up what it had perhaps authorized in the first place. The results seem beyond dispute: “that police killed 6, wounded more than 40, and disappeared 43 people.” The fate of the disappeared remains open to question: were they sent to be incinerated by a drug gang in collusion with police, or, as their parents hope, are they still alive and held captive by the government? The Teachers College in Ayotzinapa was a progressive institution that was at odds with government repression. As one sophomore explains, “the way of life here, the context, the government harassment and persecution that is always present, I mean it never dissipates, and one has to start, little by little, getting used to the idea that this school isn’t any old school.” The underclassmen who dominate the early part of the account had no idea what they were getting into when they were enlisted to participate in an “action” commemorating an earlier police massacre of students in Mexico. They sensed something was wrong from the outset, when the bus drivers moved slowly and then stopped before armed police, who initially fired shots in the air but soon turned their fire on the students, who responded with rocks. When soldiers belatedly arrived, they threatened to turn the students over to the police who had been shooting them. Hospitals were indifferent: “They should have killed you,” said one hospital director to those seeking help. This is the account of those who witnessed and survived the attacks as well as that of the parents who still search for the 43.
Repetitive in detail but cumulatively very moving.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-87286-748-2
Page Count: 260
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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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