An affecting portrait of a country that is awash in poverty, sadness, and uncertainty.
Cuba is on the verge…but of what?
Argentinian journalist Guerriero (A Simple Story: The Last Malambo, 2017, etc.) brings together 12 writers to assess the state of Cuba today in these very personal essays. Six natives write from the inside, six from the outside looking in. Theirs is a somber take on the island country. Novelist Patricia Engel writes about “Mi Amigo Manuel,” who works six days a week driving people around Havana in his classic American car. He succinctly captures the country’s ennui in just a few sentences: popes and presidents come and go, “but for us, nothing changes. Here we are. Here we will always be….The same Cuba, the same ruta, the same struggle always.” His pessimistic attitude echoes throughout the book. Even baseball, which is discussed a few times, has changed. Soccer has taken over. Cuban journalist/novelist Leonardo Padura reflects back on his youth and his passion for the game in the bittersweet “Dreaming in Cuba.” Fidel’s Castro’s revolution took away the proud profession of baseball and turned it into an amateur sport, ending players’ livelihoods. What Padura sees in the streets of Havana “is not a simple phenomenon of fashion or sports preference: it is a cultural trauma of unpredictable consequences for the Cuban identity.” What one finds all over Cuba now, besides the shortages of basic items, are the jineteras, women who prostitute themselves, and the jineteros, men who play the gigolo for foreign visitors. In her shocking “Glamour and Revolution,” Cuban poet and novelist Wendy Guerra notes that abortion is now the country’s contraception, and as for the “female figure’s relationship to Cuban heroes, leaders, and rulers, she isn’t even in the background. She simply doesn’t exist.” As screenwriter and director Mauricio Vicent ironically puts it, for most, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is magical realism. In Cuba, it’s a “deeply sensible and realistic novel.”
An affecting portrait of a country that is awash in poverty, sadness, and uncertainty.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-266106-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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 Yorker staff 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
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
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