A hard-nosed, cleareyed analysis of a legacy of institutionalized corruption and its dire consequences for human lives.
One of the clearest accounts yet of the causes for the violence in Ciudad Juárez and the convoluted politics behind Mexico’s attempts to keep it from dragging the whole nation down.
Ainslie (Education/Univ. of Texas; Long Dark Road: Bill King and Murder in Jasper, Texas, 2004, etc.), a psychologist and filmmaker with dual Mexican and American citizenship, interviewed scores of Juárenses over some of the worst years for violence (2007-2010). By chance, they coincided with the mayoral term of José Reyes Ferriz, who is effectively the central figure of the narrative. A member of Mexico’s deeply entrenched Institutional Revolutionary Party (known by its Spanish initials PRI), Reyes Ferriz was at odds with the party’s old regime leadership as represented by the governor of Juárez’s state of Chihuahua, José Reyes Baeza. This political rift stemmed as much from Mexico’s decade-old experiment in democracy, which allowed parties other than PRI to win elections, as it did from the increasingly violent wars for control of the drug traffic to the United States by rival cartels based in Juarez and Sinaloa, which Mexican President Felipe Calderón has tried to fight with the national military. It’s a complicated story with tangles of threads leading all over the place—from PRI’s repression of student and leftist dissent in the 1960s and ’70s to the expiration of the U.S. assault weapons ban in 2004 that led to a radical spike in the appearance of deadly AR-15 automatic rifles in the hands of cartel operatives. Though occasionally miring the story in repetitious regurgitation of news clips, Ainslie does best when focusing on the often heartbreaking stories of the long-suffering people of Juárez.
A hard-nosed, cleareyed analysis of a legacy of institutionalized corruption and its dire consequences for human lives.Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0292738904
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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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