KLAXON READS: DAY OF RECKONING: How the Far Right Declared War on Democracy, & THE COURT V. THE VOTERS: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights

THE COURT V. THE VOTERS: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights
JOSHUA A. DOUGLAS
Beacon Press
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An urgent and gripping look at the erosion of voting rights and its implications for democracy, told through the stories of 9 Supreme Court decisions—and the next looming case

In The Court v. The Voters, law professor Joshua Douglas takes us behind the scenes of significant cases in voting rights—some surprising and unknown, some familiar—to investigate the historic crossroads that have irrevocably changed our elections and the nation. In crisp and accessible prose, Douglas tells the story of each case, sheds light on the intractable election problems we face as a result, and highlights the unique role the highest court has played in producing a broken electoral system.

Douglas charts infamous cases like:

Bush v. Gore, which opened the door to many election law claims

Citizens United, which contributed to skewed representation—but perhaps not in the way you might think

Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the vital protections of the Voting Rights Act

Crawford v. Marion County Elections Board, which allowed states to enforce voter ID laws and make it harder for people to vote

The Court v. The Voters powerfully reminds us of the tangible, real-world effects from the Court’s voting rights decisions. While we can—and should—lament the democracy that might have been, Douglas argues that we can—and should—double down in our efforts to protect the right to vote.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I share the author's concerns over the ugliness our current Court has enabled to flourish and entrench itself in our country.

But the remedy, the true solution to the problem, lies in your control, not the Court's. You vote for the president of the United States of America, who nominates the Justices; you vote for the Senators who advise on and consent to the appointment of them. If you do not like the current Court, it is down to you and your (non-)votes.

There are enforcements of rules contra the Justices and their brazen flouting of even the most basic norms of judicial conduct not happening now that could happen if there is enough public pressure on Congress to act. The hideous horror of the 2024 election cycle is a very convenient smokescreen behind which inactivity's awful price is coming due. There are calls to expand the Supreme Court, as was done a hundred years ago, to match the number of Justices to the number of districts...thirteen, up from nine in 1891...in the Federal justice system. Right-wingers are *desperate* to prevent this. It would almost guarantee a liberal or moderate majority on the Court. But the single most important change needed is eliminating lifetime appointments for all Federal judges, which will require a Constitutional Amendment. That will be HUGELY difficult, no matter when we do it. It is another thing the current roiling atmosphere of hatred and distrust virtually guarantees that the status quo will remain, as long as the democratic institutions remain active.

All of which is just to touch on some of the immense stakes in this election.

Vote against the further degradation of the citizen's only remaining lever to use against the fascist billionaires and their economic pals of the Nerd Reich: hold your nose if you must, violate your principles if that's what it takes, but take the affirmative action of going to your designated polling place and casting your vote against Donald Trump and JD Vance. Love Harris or loathe her, she will not enable a furtherance of the coup enshrining the fascists into power.

It really is your last chance to vote.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


DAY OF RECKONING: How the Far Right Declared War on Democracy
MIKE WENDLING
Pluto Press
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The United States has become an almost unrecognizable country—with millions in thrall to conspiracy theories, toxic populism, and the far right edging closer to total power—a dire threat to civil society and democratic institutions.

While the MAGA movement was in remission due to Donald Trump's defeat in 2020, the fascist fringes have not just survived but have continued to thrive and burrow into the mainstream. The January 6th Capitol Riot prosecutions have done little to curb their enthusiasm for mayhem. Trump's base in the Republican Party is committed to their candidate like never before. The institutionalization of racist voting suppression and the outdated logic behind the Electoral College means he could take back the White House. Apocalyptic messaging ensures the alt-right, anti-government, anti-LGBT, and white nationalist groups see the next election as a life or death struggle and are uniting to back the one person they can all agree on—guaranteeing another chaotic election.

In this chilling exposé, Wendling encounters Capital rioters, Covid deniers, QAnon supporters, and Proud Boys and uncovers the roots of a movement that threatens to shatter the foundations of democracy.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Told in tendentious, apocalyptic tones, this aptly labeled exposé of the late-stage progress of the fascist-billionaire/Nerd Reich's long-running, carefully coordinated reversion of the US to conditions prevailing a century-plus ago presents a very persuasive case...if you're not looking for academic rigor. That is not the remit of this book.

What you'll get here is primary sources telling their stories of regretted participation (Mrs. Alex Jones), and stories with legs about the perpetrators of the media rejiggering of our cultural norms...stuff that makes a positive difference to know, and to see synthesized in one place, but that is meant to inform you and awake you from denial. If you want a dissertation-level, fact-checked, peer-reviewed tome, seek elsewhere.

Well aimed at a suddenly jolted aware, smart layperson, this is a short and easy read. Not many words will send one to the dictionary. Few ideas here are going to be hard to grasp, and the few you'll run into that aren't geberally already familiar are researchable on Wikipedia with solidly reliable results. (Yes, I did it myself to be certain.)

Is your second cousin showing signs of coming out from the anesthesia of outrage dripped into them by red-meat right outlets? Here's a very good source of opening of the eyes. I can but hope that I know enough people with a spare twenty and some needy recipients in their orbit to get this to some young men the scum are targeting, in order to arrest his slide into fascism.

Before the election is better, but any time is good.

BAD MAKES BAD, second Cherry Orozco cozy lesbian horror...that even *looks* weird typed out

BAD MAKES BAD
ILYN WELCH (A Cherry Orozco Mystery #2)
Shotgun Honey Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Cherry Orozco keeps slapping women—in her dreams. And she’s a sleep-deprived mess. Free group therapy at a neighborhood mental-health center steers her to confront issues of past and present trauma, including those about childhood frenemy Lana Picasso, a one-psycho hazing factory. Adding to her angst is the fact some monster is on the loose, booby-trapping area playgrounds with razor blades among other crimes.

The support sessions appear to help, plus Cherry clicks with a kindred smart-ass named Parvati who devours serial-killer paperbacks and clashes with the indifferent therapist. As group members bare their souls and work on coping strategies, the razor-blade incidents escalate outside the center’s walls. When the villainy is brought up at therapy, Parvati goes overboard relishing the gory details, making her Cherry’s number-one suspect—until she disappears.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Book 2 of two so far, and what a weird find it is! Book 1 is Signs of Pain, which I have not read...yet...but, as this is a development from it, I think I get the drift.

I've said often enough that horror only scares me when it's about people. This weirdly cozy story is in the vein (!) of Dan Wells's I Am Not a Serial Killer. Only this time it's queer and female-centered, which renders (!) it an even-more relatable process of struggle against urges one is not wise to give in to...to put it mildly. And Cherry Orozco, on Ilyn Welch's storyrelling hands, still finds a credible way to harness the energy of the urges in her group therapy sessions.

Given the nature of those urges, she's got a rough go to get something good out of it. The story's got the absolute weirdest cozy vibe imaginable. I was expecting something along the lines of Dexter's hyperbloody quirkiness, and instead got something that vibes like Joan Hess's Maggody. (Though I don't want to mislead you: there is gore. Just, well, cozy gore.) That's a compliment of a high order as Arly (short for "Aerial" as in "photo") and her mom Ruby Bee (short for Rubella Belinda, as in the thing we get our kids vaccinated against) are genuinely fun to hang (!) with.

I've got to stop.

So Cherry has to get, and keep, her head in shape to find the rotten-souled responsible party behind a series of horrible mutilations of kids who encounter the razor blades left on playgrounds. As this is so horrifying to me I wanted a revenge-fantasy ending with all kinds of screaming and blood spurting as the perp was dismembered slowly. (I disapprove of traumatizing children.) Buuut noooo we got a...much more sane, more proportional if less condign ending. Dammit!

Honestly, though, do you need a better reason to pick these up than the fact they're set in Raptor Flats?! I mean! Raptor. Flats. I've about got my trunks half-packed for the move. The side characters all have a well-settled feel, so I'm guessing they's mostly brought along from book 1. Crucially I felt more like I wanted to go get to know them, not like I was trying to make new friends in high school.

The oddness of the idea is what makes my response to the book so welcoming, I think. I'm delighted by Cherry and her inner monologue; I'm charmed by the folk of Raptor Flats; I'm ready to go back already. I'm not going to tell you it's an intricately plotted puzzle. Instead I'll tell you that, every step of the way, Ilyn Welch told me a story I enjoyed reading and believed (within my scope of suspension of disbelief) was completely true to the people it involved.

I even accepted the villain's heinous villainy, and what a genuinely detestable villain indeed!, and thus child-endangering actions. Though I won't again. Once is all you get.

Fun #Deathtober romp, well worth your time and such a truly minimal amount of your treaure.

THE POLITICS OF GEN Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy...if they have the chance

THE POLITICS OF GEN Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy
MELISSA DECKMAN
Columbia University Press
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Progressive activism today is increasingly spearheaded by the nation’s youngest voters. Gen Z—those born between 1997 and 2012—has come of age in a decade of upheavals. They have witnessed the election of Donald Trump, the murder of George Floyd, and the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, and they have lived under the constant threats of mass shootings and climate change. In response, left-leaning Zoomers, particularly women and LGBTQ people, have banded together to take action.

This book tells the story of Gen Z’s growing political participation—and why it is poised to drive U.S. politics leftward. Bringing together original data and compelling narrative—including nearly one hundred interviews with Gen Z activists and several national surveys—political scientist Melissa Deckman explores the world of youth-led progressive organizing, highlighting the crucial importance of gender and sexuality. She reveals why women and LGBTQ Zoomers are participating in politics at higher levels than their straight male peers, creating a historic “reverse gender gap.” Deckman takes readers inside Gen Z’s fight for a more inclusive and just future, sharing stories of their efforts to defend reproductive rights, prevent gun violence, stem climate change, and win political office.

A deep dive into the politics of Gen Z, this book sheds new light on how young voters view politics and why their commitment to progressive values may transform the country in the years ahead.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The US presidential election is a few weeks away. Many of my Boomer peers are, I fear, going to be very angry, and the young men they've knowingly toxified will take to the streets.

It will be futile.

The long-term trend, "the arc of the moral universe," is not on their side. This book shows that the overall age cohort, absent the targeted and radicalized men we insultingly call "incels" and other dismissive and emasculating nicknames, isn't getting the authoritarian message. They aren't doing what we did, sitting down at our desks and shutting our mouths, because the stupid greedy oldsters at the top stopped "sharing" the wealth. (That our labor created, but never mind that for now.)

You take away people's stake in the system, you throw away the stick you can beat them back into line with. The Jesus freaks and their multivarious co-religionists in the control cult have realized this and gone full theocracy in response. And the grim truth is staring at them from every young person's eyes: "NO." The word they hate the most. Good for the youth, I say. Stonewall in 1969 was my signal that I could say no. George Floyd's murder, #BLM #MeToo Roevember are theirs.

But the money is still going to do its bloody, vicious, destructive best to stay on top. The Russians, with their collaborators the City men in London, are swimming in money. These are deeply illiberal people with A LOT TO LOSE. Read some Bill Browder and Jessikka Aro, study up on Alexei Navalny and his fate, look into the reason the felonious (thirty-four convictions!) Cheeto-dusted grifter got installed in government housing in 2016. Hoping that'll happen at a different Pennsylvania address again soon...preferably White Deer, Pennsylvania, this time...like me? Pay sustained attention to this existentially threatening election.

That said, there's a lot of work to be done to mend fences with this embittered cohort of people. As Psychology Today reports in their article on the topic that refers to the author and her findings, "Gen Z Americans are interested in addressing specific issues rather than defending a party position. Whether or not they identify as liberal or conservative, they agree on the need for effective government solutions to major social challenges. The disagreements over more or less government intervention that underlie the polarized American political landscape of today are less visible amongst them."

If that is not a blaring klaxon for oldsters to Pay Bloody Attention I can't imagine what else could be. The existence of the GOP and the Democratic Party are not divinely ordained. This sclerotic duopoly is not the only possibility of goverment organization for the young who have witnessed the venality and callousness of both sides to the burgeoning crises around the world. I have to take a half-star off for the author's choice to leave this tendentious conclusion out of the book.

I do not want to understate the stakes of 45's hand-picked Supreme Court's ruling on Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215. This last-ditch effort to reduce women's right to full citizenship, ie bodily autonomy, as a means of social control, is probably going to galvanize young women to vote in large numbers. Thank all those useless gods for that. Every other facet of this horrible travesty of justice is sick-making.

The diversity of the activism of this age cohort is ethnic more than gender-based. The efforts to undermine the intent of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are meant to reduce the access to voting of the most radicalized women in this generational cohort.

The young could save us from the vast right-wing conspiracy referenced by Hillary Clinton in 1995, the one determined to reinstall the convicted felon in charge of the most powerful machinery of coercion on the planet, achieving their aim. I'm hopeful they can. The obstacles put on the way of their ability to do so, the deliberate and carefully calculated efforts to hive off the angriest, thus most likely to take action, young men from the predominant attitudes of their peers, could work...but only if we ignore their reality.

Don't sleepwalk into 1933 Germany's fate The threat to democracy, flawed and fucked-up as it is, is real.

THE WITCHES OF EL PASO, a deeply pleasurable read for my Frontera-raised self

THE WITCHES OF EL PASO
LUIS JARAMILLO
Atria/Primero Sueno Press
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A lawyer and her elderly great-aunt use their supernatural gifts to find a lost child in this richly imagined and empowering story of motherhood, magic, and legacy in the vein of The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina and La Hacienda.

If you call to the witches, they will come.

1943, El Paso, teenager Nena spends her days caring for the small children of her older sisters, while longing for a life of freedom and adventure. The premonitions and fainting spells she has endured since childhood are getting worse, and Nena worries she’ll end up like the scary old curandera down the street. Nena prays for help, and when the mysterious Sister Benedicta arrives late one night, Nena follows her across the borders of space and time. In colonial Mexico, Nena grows into her power, finding love and learning that magic always comes with a price.

In the present day, Nena’s grandniece, Marta, balances a struggling legal aid practice with motherhood and the care of the now ninety-three-year-old Nena. When Marta agrees to help search for a daughter Nena left in the past, the two forge a fierce connection. Marta’s own supernatural powers emerge, awakening her to new possibilities that threaten the life she has constructed.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: So satisfying. Slow and intricate, deep and wise. I'm sure some will find the woven timelines...no definitive breaks or obtrusive tricks mark the shifts in the timeline...to be deal-breakingly imprecise, but to me that made this like an oral performace of a mythic tale. I will say that, as this is also a review of the book meant to instruct others in its merits, I've nicked a half-star off because this pigeonholes the Perfect Reader a bit overly finely.

I don't always love it when men take it upon themselves to write about motherhood. Author Jaramillo manages to do this feat without making the commonest mistakes men fall into: flattening the narrative scope into a litany of caretaking chores or glossing over these same chores. The effect is the same either end of the spectrum. It makes the work of motherhood into insignificant triviality. I hasten to add that many women writers have done the same, Gone Girl being a notable example. In this book, caretaking, mothering, is literally everywhere and yet this didn't obtrude into my consciousness until I was reviewing my notes before writing this review.

That's well-done prosody...I'm in the sounds of the story not in the structure of it. As these are the sounds of la frontera, where I grew up, I fell right in and did not notice it. Very well done indeed, Author Jaramillo.

I don't think any one thing worked more in favor of the book than Nena's manner of explaining the past to her modern, harried granddaughter, not as a place of beautiful memories but of deeds undine and consequences unmet. Business to be finished dominates every life, none moreso than that of the oldest among us. I resonated like a struck bell to this thread of the tapestry woven for me.

As a way to add some occult flavor and Hispanic culture to your #Deathtober reading, this works very well. As a lovely story of the intense bonds of a loving family woman, forced by bitter circumstance to choose actions permanent and irremediable, making amends as best she can, it's gloriously satisfying.

Read soonest.

COMMON SENSE ECONOMICS: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity, everyone should know but not believe this is Received Truth

COMMON SENSE ECONOMICS: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity
VARIOUS AUTHORS
St. Martin's Press
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The fully revised and updated fourth edition of the classic Common Sense Economics.

As the global economy recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic and debates over the future of work challenge our long-held preconceptions about what careers and the market can be, learning the basics of economics has never been more essential. Principles such as gains from trade, the role of profit and loss, and the secondary effects of government spending, taxes, and borrowing risk continue to be critically important to the way America's economy functions, and critically important to understand for those hoping to further their professional lives—even their personal lives.

Common Sense Economics discusses these key points and theories and more, using them to show how any reader can make wiser personal choices and form more informed positions on policy. Now in its fourth edition, this classic from James D. Gwartney, Jane S. Stroup, Dwight R. Lee, and Tawni H. Ferrarini has been fully updated to include commentary on the effects of the pandemic on the global economy and the workplace; it offers insight into political processes and the many ways in which economics informs policy, illuminating our world and what might be done to make it better.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Not entertaining, not as dry as a textbook either. Densely packed tendentious freemarketeering with a curious blind spot to how its own examples undermine its Hayek-lite assumptions about how the economy (as though that was one readily definable, easy-to-encompass in words, entity) works and should work. I think any book that trumpets a viewpoint, eg "low taxes good" here, should be honest enough to mark this out as editorializing. More especially since their own chosen examples of, eg, businesses seeking tariffs on imported goods to protect their market share presented without the expected free-trader's opprobrium, sorta gives the lie to the book's claims to being "commonsense" since this violates their own oft-reinforced (I fought myself hard to strive for neutrality I do not feel by changing the word from the judgmental but truthful "repeated") statements supporting "low taxes good."

The revisions undertaken post-COVID really ought honestly to have been labeled "post-China falling from favor." As a policy guide, not recommended, then. But for an economics explainer of how neoliberal economics wants you to think it works...modern research undermines the existence of the core neoliberal concept of "rational actors"...it's solid and as easy as it can get. All my stars for that useful quality.

Stay skeptical, then, and remember any time someone wants you to think a system is infallible, or "self-correcting," or "maximizing efficiency," they're not just factually incorrect but wrong. Plus almost guaranteed to be manipulating you for their own (however broad a definition of "their" you care to apply) benefit.

THE BOOK OF WITCHING, the kind of horror that keeps me awake

THE BOOK OF WITCHING
C.J. COOKE
Berkley Books
$19.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A mother must fight for her daughter’s life in this fierce and haunting tale of witchcraft and revenge from the author of A Haunting in the Arctic.

Clem gets a call that is every mother’s worst nightmare. Her nineteen-year-old daughter Erin is unconscious in the hospital after a hiking trip with her friends on the remote Orkney Islands that met a horrifying end, leaving her boyfriend dead and her best friend missing. When Erin wakes, she doesn’t recognize her mother. And she doesn’t answer to her name, but insists she is someone named Nyx.

Clem travels the site of her daughter’s accident, determined to find out what happened to her. The answer may lie in a dark secret in the history of the Orkneys: a woman wrongly accused of witchcraft and murder four centuries ago. Clem begins to wonder if Erin’s strange behavior is a symptom of a broken mind, or the effects of an ancient curse?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The dual-timeline haters are duly warned: this novel uses that technique in an absolutely inescapable way. It's not a gimmick to improve pacing...it's integral to the story, and deployed in a way you invest in right away, or really dislike instantly. It does not change for the entire book so be advised of that if you do not like it on contact.

The initial horror set-up, a mother hearing that her daughter who was off on an adventure holiday is now in the hospital, scared me enough. "It can't get worse than this," thought innocent little me. Your kid's in a burn unit far away. You have to get there, worried out of your mind. Your beloved only child is, when you can finally speak to her, someone else...or so she says. "It can not get worse than this," I shuddered.

Had I but known....

I don't go in for supernatural stories, witches and devils and suchlike silliness. If something supernatural like that existed, I'd've seen it for myself in these past *cough*ty-*mumble* years. Ain't happened. Weird shit, yes; devils and gods and miracles, nope. None of that kind of horror is here, either. It's all the slimy rottenness of Humanity. It's all the horrible stench of misogyny. It's all greed and control at their ugliest and most personal.

Just in somehow linked points in past and present.

That's as far as suspension of disbelief will take me, so I'm glad that's as far as we went. There's nothing but a truly unnervingly described...talisman? power focus?...wisely left ambiguous. If one wants a supernatural explanation for these weirdly entwined events so distant from each other in time, there's a way to see that; there's also nothing that requires it to have that explanation, and the horror in the story told is of human origin.

That made it just right for me to read this #Deathtober, and is why I gave it four stars. I found Clem's anguish and confusion horrifying because they're totally relatable. Her child, a new mother herself, is wounded terribly in body and quite possibly irretrievably in psyche. That could not possibly be worse, except evil Author Cooke made it scarier by introducing elements that are outside normal parameters.

Parents of teens strongly cautioned.

SEASON OF THE SWAMP, historical figure in historic city navigating his way into History

SEASON OF THE SWAMP
YURI HERRERA (tr. Lisa Dillman)
Graywolf Press
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city of New Orleans.

Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings they witness as they try to shape their future.

Though the historical archive is silent about the eighteen months Juárez spent in New Orleans, Yuri Herrera imagines how Juárez’s time there prepared him for what was to come. With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A vividly imagined and intensely told expansion on the historical record of President Juárez's exile from Mexico. Arriving in New Orleans, with its slave markets, must've been a shock coming from Mexico thirtyish years after the trade was outlawed and slavery abolished there. Like everything else Juárez thought or felt in those years, though, Author Herrera has had to reconstruct it from the known, more importantly the documented, facts of his later life.

So it is that the events related in this novel can't be verified; there aren't any records in his, or anyone else who was there's, own words what the people around Juárez said, or thought, or felt. This reconstructed tale that relies on the history of New Orleans in 1853 as extensively documented has the feel of verisimilitude. We can't know if Author Herrera got it all, as regards Juárez at least, factually correct, but I can tell you he got it right.

Juárez, as an Indigenous Mexican in the US at that fraught passage in our history, would've seen and been the subject of the nastiest kind of "racial" prejudice. Mexico was no kind of enlightened paradise at this moment, but there was no threat of being kidnapped, then sold into slavery, as the was in the antebellum South. I don't know if one major plot point relating to slavery is factual, but it wouldn't surprise me. In fact I kind of hope it was, even if it wasn't Juárez's own story. (You'll know as soon as you run across it which one I mean.)

If this story has an overriding virtue, it is that it is short enough to be an all-day-and-done read. I think it's going to be hard to put down once you begin it, so that's a very good thing. Among the events rendered all the more effectively for being curtailed in length is Juárez's immigrant journey of acquiring the local language, English, on top of his native Zapotec and the Mexican national tongue Spanish. Three very different grammars, poor bastard, and (as we who speak English first do not realize) extremely complicated to navigate the world in.

Author Herrera's writing style is both evocative and without frills and furbelows, eg: "What are we willing to ignore, or let atrophy, for the right to indolence. What a monstrous thing, comfort." It's not flowery and it's not plain. Translator Dillman is clearly working to a high level and from a highly polished source. This is the kind of work I hope we will get from author, translator, and publisher, as a team or separately, for a long time to come.

Almost five stars for compact, beautiful, concise storytelling. Some minor rubbing of noses cost it a half-star.