Smart, angry immersive journalism from an author who warrants wider readership on this side of the border.
Hard-hitting exploration of the violence visited by globalization and the narco-economy upon Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
Human Rights Prize–winning journalist Martínez (The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail, 2013) follows up his grisly, underdiscussed debut investigation of human trafficking with a similarly unflinching account of the circumstances and communities involved in the ongoing migrant crisis. “I want you to understand what thousands of Central Americans are going through,” he writes. The author argues that the American expulsion of first-generation Mara Salvatrucha and other Central American refugee gangs led to the violent groups’ expansion back home: “What the United States has tried to flush away has rather multiplied.” Simultaneously, Mexican cartels (notably the brutal Los Zetas) firmed up their transshipment routes through these countries’ rural, impoverished regions; this conjunction has resulted in the highest murder rates in the hemisphere, in areas where law enforcement is undersupported and easily corrupted. Martínez draws readers into this complex narrative by alternating between a panoramic social sweep and the beleaguered lives of civilians, victims, gang members, and cops, capturing the multilayered nature of a place whose indigenous traditions are being brutalized by modern criminals who commit murder casually. The punchy short chapters capture shocking tableaux of violence in distanced, nearly wry prose, with some characters and crimes recurring. The author follows one hardened gangster who’s obsessed with his own inevitable murder: “It’s clear that El Nino was recognized in the town as someone destined to die.” Absurdity is captured in the account of investigators facing the Sisyphean task of excavating a rural well known to be packed with corpses. Martínez returns to his earlier topic, portraying the cruelty of the migrant experience: “What you think is stupid sitting at home can be the most logical thing in the world on the trails.”
Smart, angry immersive journalism from an author who warrants wider readership on this side of the border.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78478-168-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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
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