Despite some odd byways, and an occasional clumsy sentence, a cartoon history for everyone: painless, witty, and inviting.
Educational comics have an honorable history, forged in the US by the visual didact Larry Gornick, and in Latin America by Rius, to whom Stavans (Amherst) and his artist collaborator pay tribute in their cartoon overview of Latin culture’s relation to the US.
Mexican-born Stavans here focuses on creating a historical narrative that draws heavily from popular culture and celebrates the mixture of backgrounds that find expression in present-day “spanglish.” He develops a cast of speakers that includes a conventional teacher, a toucan (homage to magic realism), the actor Cantinflas, and himself—a typically bespectacled college prof. These three emphasize the basic facts of recent history: the growing Latin presence north of Mexico; the 70 or so different ethnicities and languages south of the border; and the troubled legacy of US imperialism. Stavans gives voice to the unspoken “crucial factor” in Latin history: the mix of “racial types” that influences the course of events. He also highlights legendary Latin figures from the popular bandit Joaquin Murrieta to the saintly missionary Junipero Serra. Along the way, he and Alcaraz provide an alternate view of events familiar to most North Americans: the siege of the Alamo, the Spanish-American War, and American intervention in modern revolutionary struggles. The real strength of the book, though, is in its account of the Latin presence in the US: Stavans plugs his own work on such figures as Mexican film star Cantinflas (and also on the less important Oscar Acosta, the “Samoan” lawyer from Hunter Thompson fame). The three main groups of immigrants—from Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico—each receive due attention for their unique contributions to the evolving Pan-American culture. And Stavans even has kind words for the dissenting views of Mexican-American Richard Rodriquez, whose assimilationist vision isn’t so very different from that of Stavans and Alcazar.
Despite some odd byways, and an occasional clumsy sentence, a cartoon history for everyone: painless, witty, and inviting.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-465-08221-1
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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