The comprehensive story of a liquor empire built during a pivotal period in Mexican history.
The little-known man behind the famous drink.
This rich, edifying book remedies a striking gap in the historical record. José Cuervo's namesake tequila is one of his nation’s iconic exports, a liquor made from local agaves that became a billion-dollar industry (and begot a commensurate number of hangovers). But until now, Genoways writes, there’s never been a book about him: “Even in Mexico, there is only one brief academic study that examines Cuervo’s rise.” His low profile in death has much to do with the way he lived. As many of those near him met violent ends, he maintained a “calm, reserved exterior” and stayed “strategically invisible,” a finishing-school product who parlayed a dodgy pedigree—his uncles were land thieves—into commercial immortality. Beset by drought, crop disease, bandits, and the outbreaks of violence and political chaos that accompanied the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s, Cuervo developed various tactics to stay afloat. He won public favor with civic-minded donations, showcased his product at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, paid bribes, lobbied reporters, built political alliances, and helped bring electricity and rail lines to his region. He lived amid ambient menace and unthinkable violence, fleeing his home on horseback in the cinematic scene that opens the book and, in a subsequent chapter, spotting the hanged corpses of at least 50 revolutionary soldiers. Genoways makes frequent and effective use of diaries kept by Cuervo’s niece, a strong writer whose words help us see and hear the action. The frenetic rate of change in Mexico in this era—leadership of one state government changed five times in about a year—occasionally makes it challenging to track the narrative threads and players. But smart pacing and memorable detail are this book’s primary features.
The comprehensive story of a liquor empire built during a pivotal period in Mexican history.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780393292596
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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 Yorkerstaff 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
