in assassinations of and coups against the
leaders of developing nations who suggest
defaulting on sovereign debt or nationalizing industry. Hickel also notes that, with
the onset of global warming, developed
economies are rapidly transforming the
Earth into a death trap for rich and poor
countries alike. His writing penetratingly
explores those forces that perpetuate
global inequality and shreds the notion
that the fissure between rich and poor is
anything other than intentional. (Feb.)
★ The Kings of Big Spring:
God, Oil, and One Family’s Search
for the American Dream
Bryan Mealer. Flatiron, $27.99 (384p)
ISBN 978-1-250-05891-1
In this excellent family history, journalist Mealer ( The Boy Who Harnessed the
Wind) follows his Scotch-Irish forebears
from the hills of northern Georgia to a
distant frontier of rugged beauty,
untapped resources, and devastating hardship. The saga plays out against the vast
backdrop of West Texas from the 1890s
through the author’s youth in the 1980s
as one bonanza after another is erased by
boll weevil, drought, addiction, or greed.
Through all the dust storms and oil
gushers, through bankruptcy and epidemics, generations of Mealers chase the
American dream only to see it slip
through their grasps, leaving them to
find solace in Christian faith and one
another. Mealer brings together his disparate materials with ease. The miniature
cosmos of family life is counterpointed by
profiles of national figures such as Bob
Wills, the founder of Western Swing, and
Raymond Tollett, a polymath ex–FBI
agent who turned a bankrupt refinery into
a regional powerhouse. Post-WWII prosperity made the hobo camps, child mortality, and crushing poverty of the dust
bowl and Depression impossibly remote,
yet Mealer’s narrative allows figures long
frozen in black and white to walk again in
living color. (Feb.)
Like Brothers
Mark and Jay Duplass. Ballantine, $28
(320p) ISBN 978-1-101-96771-3
At the center of this hilarious dual
memoir, the Duplass brothers—who have
directed, produced, and written films and
TV shows such as Togetherness, Cyrus, and
I went to the school about a week after
the attacks. There was an incredible
amount of disinformation and confu-
sion in the press and in official state-
ments. So I started interviewing the
survivors. Most had not spoken to any
reporters. They hadn’t even told each
other the full stories of what they
lived through. That listening experi-
ence was incredibly
powerful. I also started
to piece together a
version of the events of
that night that was
very different from
what was prevalent in
the press and in offi-
cial statements.
The title is a quote
from one of the students who survived. Why that quote?
It points to one of the core aspects of
the attacks, which is that as the
attacks were unfolding, the students
couldn’t comprehend them. The first
students thought the police were just
shooting in the air. They thought they
knew the rules of the game: they
could be beaten up by the police, but
it was not even in the realm of possibility that a huge number of them
would be forcibly disappeared.
You talk about the two stages of
forced disappearances: the material
stage and the legal-administrative
stage. What has the second stage been
like for the families?
The second phase is just lies. To cover
the lies, government investigators actu-
ally committed a series of new atroci-
ties—torturing people, destroying
evidence, planting new evidence. So
they aren’t helping the families find
their kids, and there’s the psycholog-
ical torture of the families imagining
their kids being incinerated in a trash
dump [which is the state’s version of
events], which didn’t happen. Three
years later, there are still
high-level federal offi-
cials repeating that nar-
rative even though it’s
one of the most exhaus-
tively debunked lies in
contemporary Mexican
political history.
The parents are
demanding that the
students be returned,
The particular terror of forced disap-
pearance is precisely the not knowing.
It’s simultaneously a direct insistence
that those people be returned and it’s
a political demand that counters the
logic of forced disappearances. One of
the central myths, curiously enough,
is that the government is incompetent—that it’s incapable of processing
a crime scene or conducting an actual
investigation. I think that’s wrong
and also very dangerous. The government is extremely competent. What
they are doing is disappearing the
students and getting away with it.
—Annie Coreno
[Q&A]
PW Talks with John Gibler
It Was the State
In I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us: An Oral History of
the Attacks Against the Students of Ayotzinapa (City Lights, Nov.), jour-
nalist Gibler reconstructs the events of Sept. 26, 2014, in Iguala,
Mexico, that left six people dead and 43 students missing.
