A timeless tale rendered in spare, evocative prose.
The story of one man’s quest, simply and movingly told.
Each January, the village of Laborde, in southeastern Argentina, holds a national folkloric dance competition for the best performance of the malambo. Rigorous, energetic, and demanding, the malambo can be described simply as “a battle between men who tap in turn to music.” The competition requires that the dancer perform for five minutes—which feels like an eternity and leaves the performer drained and exhausted. With its intricate moves, athleticism, and musicality, the dance requires years of arduous training and intense concentration, but the effort is worth the outcome: national prestige. Winning the contest can be life-changing; the winner is acclaimed throughout the country, and he becomes a superstar, role model, and hero. With so much at stake, the competition is fierce. Journalist Guerriero traveled to Laborde to witness the event and became entranced by one competitor: the modest, handsome Rodolfo González Alcántara, a 28-year-old dance teacher from the town of La Pampa. When he performed, writes the author, “he made the night crackle.” Born into poverty, eking out a living teaching, Rodolfo nevertheless ardently pursued his dream of becoming a master of malambo, taking lessons, practicing for hours each day, and assessing and evaluating every step. With gentle sensitivity, Guerriero portrays his family, his encouraging teacher, his loyal girlfriend (also a dancer), and his grateful pupils. Rodolfo has no illusions about his talent and has to convince himself repeatedly that he can be a champion. His story “was that of a man who had awakened the most dangerous of emotions: hope.” Guerriero transforms Rodolfo’s quest into a fable, reminiscent of the work of her countrymen Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. She portrays Rodolfo with such obvious affection that readers cannot help cheer him on, but it would spoil the tension that the author masterfully creates to reveal the outcome of the competition.
A timeless tale rendered in spare, evocative prose.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2600-4
Page Count: 120
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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