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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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