A rare and valuable insider's take.
Castro’s Deputy Minister of Fisheries and Merchant Marine recounts his role as a secret revolutionary among the middle classes in the cities and plains of 1950s Cuba.
Born the son of a well-to-do shoe manufacturer in central Cuba, sent to Miami to study engineering in the early ’50s, Oltuski was groomed to be a solid member of Cuba's upper-middle classes. Despite his parents’ best efforts and his father's protests that a revolution was no place for Jews, however, Enrique was a revolutionary at heart, dedicated to social justice and the overthrow of military dictator Batista. After his graduation in 1954, Otulski joined the movement in earnest, first in Miami, where he attempted to secure arms for the struggle, and then in Cuba, where as a traveling executive with Shell Oil he was perfectly placed to spread propaganda, organize strikes, and plant the occasional bomb. The author rose through the ranks to join those who had contact with the revolution's superstars, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Oltuski's less glamorous station was in the plains, where he and his comrades were kept busy “collecting money, supplying arms and clothing, committing acts of sabotage, executing enemies, producing underground newspapers, recruiting and organizing members of the revolutionary movement.” Through his tale of secret meetings, assignments, committees, and endless discussions of revolutionary theory, Oltuski is able to elucidate the messy progression of the uprising; woven among the sometimes dry political details are the author's recollections of youthful partying, womanizing, and marriage. We end the story with our man in place as an utterly unqualified but highly enthusiastic minister of communications; an epilogue noting his current position attests to his political staying power.
A rare and valuable insider's take.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7879-6169-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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