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BORDERING ON CHAOS

GUERRILLAS, STOCKBROKERS, POLITICIANS, AND MEXICO'S ROAD TO PROSPERITY

NAFTA, Zapatista guerrillas, and Wall Street form the backdrop for this fine journalistic account of Mexico's current tumult. If the people of Mexico ever rise up in revolution—-as they now seem poised to do—it will be at least in part a response to the Wall Street investment bankers who, in Miami Herald reporter Oppenheimer's charged telling, have long profited from that nation's misery. Oppenheimer dissects the career of former president Salinas de Gortari, who is now in hiding, a man who entered office supposedly determined to root out corruption and who, it now appears, robbed the country blind. While doing so, he managed to convince President Clinton to engineer a politically controversial bailout of Mexico, a nation Clinton had hailed as a model of economic development. The complicated financial doings that underlie this story do not make for easy reading, but Oppenheimer lays them out patiently, and Americans wondering just what goes on behind closed doors in Washington can do worse than ponder what he has to tell. What Oppenheimer has to say about Subcomandante Marcos's Zapatista Liberation Army, a substantial portion of the book, is less immediate, if only because Marcos has been so much in the news lately. Still, his tying the Chiapas revolt into the historical context of US-Mexican affairs drives home a needed point; as he writes, ``Mexican presidents had conveyed the idea to their friends in Washington . . . that they were the only ones standing between a modernizing, pro-American Mexico and an insurgent Mexico'' poised to expropriate American holdings there. That specter, Oppenheimer suggests, now allows the administration to hail yet another ``reform president,'' Ernesto Zedillo and to proclaim against all evidence, as Clinton has done, that ``the Mexican economy has turned the corner.'' Mexico watchers expect hard times to come for that country, and Oppenheimer's excellent book explains just why.

Pub Date: April 17, 1996

ISBN: 0-316-65095-1

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE

The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...

A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.

Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.

The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017

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