As good a look at Mexico as has been written by outsiders since Alan Riding’s Distant Neighbors (1984), and essential for...
Superb from-the-barricades portrait of Mexico’s second revolution, which is still unfolding.
New York Times reporters Preston and Dillon offer a vivid account of matters that would have been common knowledge to American readers had newspapers or newsmagazines showed interest in our southern neighbor’s affairs: the complex transformation of a one-party system, the longest-ruling in the world, into a pluralistic democracy. In fairness to American readers, Preston and Dillon observe, the momentous process, known to Mexicans as el cambio—the change—caught many Mexicans unaware, too: “Mexico’s second revolution was accomplished so efficiently and peacefully that not many Mexicans, and even fewer outsiders, really grasped the historic dimensions of the event.” Whatever the case, the Mexican electorate ended more than 70 years of one-party rule in July 2000, turning out the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in favor of newcomer Vicente Fox’s National Action Party (PAN). The change had many agents: labor activists, the disaffected urban poor, supporters of the Zapatista rebel movement, middle-class intellectuals, ordinary citizens shocked by corruption and the brutality of the police and military. It also had an unlikely ally in PRI president and party leader Ernesto Zedillo, who, like Mikhail Gorbachev (to whom he has been likened), bowed to the inevitable and accepted the will of the people—even if many party stalwarts, and their American hireling James Carville, did not. Though Fox, who won 43 percent of the vote in a three-way race, has been a disappointment—so Preston and Dillon conclude—the awakening has made all the difference: “It soon became obvious that [Fox’s] victory would not bring prosperity, equality, and justice overnight. . . . But nobody seriously questioned the essential vigor of the democracy Mexicans had constructed, and the country’s peaceful transition remained a source of pride.”
As good a look at Mexico as has been written by outsiders since Alan Riding’s Distant Neighbors (1984), and essential for students of Latin American affairs.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-22668-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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