Essential reading for a serious understanding of how the war on drugs is destroying the social fabric of South American...
Rigorous, disturbing narrative of how drug cartels infiltrated Mexican society’s highest levels.
Investigative journalist Hernández has clearly put herself at risk to assemble this specific social narrative that begins in the 1980s, when Mexican drug trafficking was regionalized and controlled and thus tolerated by the government (and covertly by the United States, as evidenced by traffickers’ involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal). Hernández sees the 2001 prison escape of the aggressive trafficker “El Chapo” Guzman as a crucial watershed for the sharp increase in violence. Guzman then formed a “Federation” among various midlevel cartels, forcing open warfare between that group and the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels and making overt the federal government’s protection of him (beginning with his “escape”). This, in turn, enraged hyperviolent assassin cells in the employ of other drug barons, such as the notorious Zetas, initially composed of compromised Special Forces veterans. The result has been approximately 10,000 murders per year and the thorough discrediting of Mexico’s labyrinthine bureaucracy and political system. Hernández notes that “Felipe Calderon stepped down as president of Mexico in December 2012 [with his term] engraved in collective memory as an era of death and corruption.” The author pulls no punches in backing up such assertions; rather, she reviews evidence showing that the cartels’ real power lies in relationships with untouchable elites in fields like banking and air transport. She similarly demonstrates that key police agencies, such as the Federal Investigations Agency, have been compromised, one of many examples of how “the Mexican government treats the narco-tycoons as untouchable.” Hernández writes clearly, savoring the details and ironies of her investigation, with a tone of righteous polemical outrage, but her tale’s grim implications and intricate narrative connections may prove hard going for casual readers.
Essential reading for a serious understanding of how the war on drugs is destroying the social fabric of South American nations.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-78168-073-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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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