It’s clear that Cacho, with such passion for her subject, understands far more than her audience will. Unfortunately, she...
Award-winning El Universal journalist Cacho has a history of crusading for human rights through her work. Here, she chronicles her global travels to document the world of human trafficking.
Loosely organized into geographic regions first and then into the ways and means of the trafficking industry, the book never lacks for information. Cacho met untold numbers of sex slaves, pimps, law enforcement agents and rescue workers, and it’s obvious she learned a great deal from all of them. This wealth of material, however, causes some problems for the author. Instead of giving detailed accounts, Cacho skims the surfaces of most stories in what seems like an attempt to include as much information as possible. This has the effect of making the book simultaneously dense and shallow, urgent and haphazard. Combined with a tendency to move on from a topic without fully supporting it, there is an underlying sense that the author had so much to say, she was unable to condense and synthesize it into something manageable. Further, many of her references are more than 10 years old, leading to questions of relevance. Directly addressing the reason for this would have been useful in allaying reader concerns about her research. Cacho also examines topics intimately related to trafficking, like money laundering, but these sections suffer the same lack of depth and clarity. What make the book palatable despite these deficiencies are the obvious dedication the author carries for her subject and her gift with words. Cacho is at her best when she loses herself in her interactions with her subjects; in those moments, the writing is so elegant that it purges memories of clunky exposition.
It’s clear that Cacho, with such passion for her subject, understands far more than her audience will. Unfortunately, she fails to make the connections for those who don’t have her background knowledge.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-296-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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