An important record of the incremental steps one journalist took against sexual violence in Mexico.
A Mexican journalist bravely sets precedent in the highest court in targeting corruption and influence pedaling.
Many journalists in Mexico have been targeted for assassination, and many more have colluded with the corrupt Mafia rings that buy them off so they will water down the news rather than give the hard-hitting truth. Couragoeus El Universal journalist Cacho (Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking, 2014, etc.) famously took on the pedophile and child-pornography ring of Jean Succar Kuri and all those in power protecting him (including judges from the highest court and the governor of Puebla) and got the criminal jailed for good in 2011. However, the toll on her journalistic integrity nearly broke her, as she recounts in this detailed look at the Kuri pedophilia case that began in 2003, when one of the young victims first appealed to Cacho, an editor and director of a women’s care center, for help. Her investigations led to a damning book, Demons of Eden (2005), based on much videotaping and interviews that Kuri himself made about having sex with girls as young as 5. However, in a horrific incidence of kidnapping, Cacho was actually arrested and taken to Puebla, where she was charged with defamation, all at the irate behest of the state’s governor, Mario Marín. As the case unraveled and Cacho scrambled to find a team to defend her, the miscarriage of justice routinely taking place within Mexico’s criminal justice system was stunning, stemming from the exorbitant power that Mexico’s governors exercise through what Cacho calls “metaconstitutional mechanisms.” The author received frequent death threats and had to hire her own security detail, but the combined resolve she inherited from her fiery family and the determination to avenge the abused children led her on a remarkable, solitary crusade for justice.
An important record of the incremental steps one journalist took against sexual violence in Mexico.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59376-643-6
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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