An important record of the incremental steps one journalist took against sexual violence in Mexico.
A Mexican journalist bravely sets precedent in the highest court in targeting corruption and influence pedaling.
Many journalists in Mexico have been targeted for assassination, and many more have colluded with the corrupt Mafia rings that buy them off so they will water down the news rather than give the hard-hitting truth. Couragoeus El Universal journalist Cacho (Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking, 2014, etc.) famously took on the pedophile and child-pornography ring of Jean Succar Kuri and all those in power protecting him (including judges from the highest court and the governor of Puebla) and got the criminal jailed for good in 2011. However, the toll on her journalistic integrity nearly broke her, as she recounts in this detailed look at the Kuri pedophilia case that began in 2003, when one of the young victims first appealed to Cacho, an editor and director of a women’s care center, for help. Her investigations led to a damning book, Demons of Eden (2005), based on much videotaping and interviews that Kuri himself made about having sex with girls as young as 5. However, in a horrific incidence of kidnapping, Cacho was actually arrested and taken to Puebla, where she was charged with defamation, all at the irate behest of the state’s governor, Mario Marín. As the case unraveled and Cacho scrambled to find a team to defend her, the miscarriage of justice routinely taking place within Mexico’s criminal justice system was stunning, stemming from the exorbitant power that Mexico’s governors exercise through what Cacho calls “metaconstitutional mechanisms.” The author received frequent death threats and had to hire her own security detail, but the combined resolve she inherited from her fiery family and the determination to avenge the abused children led her on a remarkable, solitary crusade for justice.
An important record of the incremental steps one journalist took against sexual violence in Mexico.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59376-643-6
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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