Accessible roundup of the evolution of modern Latin American political thought via the lives and convictions of key leaders and writers.
Mexican journalist and editor Krauze (Mexico: Biography of Power, 1997, etc.) shapes his work through an engaging mixture of biography and historical currents in the style of Isaiah Berlin or Edmund Wilson, thus allowing lay readers to follow what can sometimes be for the English reader a dizzying succession of revolutions, doctrine and caudillos. The author proceeds more or less chronologically, from the late 19th century to the present, from the lives of four prophets—the four Josés (Martí, Rodó, Vasconcelos and Mariátegui) through poet Octavio Paz, popular icons Eva Perón and Che Guevara, novelists Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa and present-day Venezuelan hero à la Bolivar, Hugo Chávez. In Martí, a Cuban-born New Yorker journalist advocating for Cuban independence, Krauze traces the beginnings of Latin American disenchantment with American-style freedom when the U.S. defeated Spain in 1898. The Generation of ’98 was galvanized by work such as Rodó’s Ariel, which reversed ongoing racist, imperialist theories by asserting the superiority of Latin American culture “over the mere utilitarianism espoused by the Caliban of the North.” Rodó’s emphasis on the education of youth, Vasconcelos’s fashioning of the Mexican foundation myth and Mariátegui’s affirmation of Peruvian indigenous culture and pride set the stage for the next generation’s Marxism ideology and revolution. While the poetry of Nobel Prize winner Paz would reflect both his sympathy for communism and later disillusionment with the Soviet Union, the sweeping prose of García Márquez and Vargas Llosa took on the mythopoesis of the dictator and revolutionary. Charismatically tragic figures like Perón and Guevara fulfilled themes of Christian martyrdom, while the postmodern Chávez reignites the cult of the leader, despite the promising evolution of electoral democracy in all of Latin America. Krauze demystifies for his North American neighbors the crucial ideas that have shaped Latin America and rendered it distinct from the United States.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-621473-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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