Flawed as it is, readers may still find this portrait of the little-known, remarkable revolutionary of interest.
Despite the publisher’s description of this as a biography, it is rather a finely detailed historical novel that sticks closely to the facts of this little-known Latin American activist.
Born into a rich, slaveholding Cuban family, Emilia is filled with zeal for freedom from an early age. She refuses to submit to the silent, submissive role of a woman of her time and station, rebelling against her conservative father by championing suffrage for slaves and Cuban independence from Spain. When asked while abroad to deliver contraband papers to her native island home, Emilia sees her chance to be in the thick of the rebellion against Spanish authority. Even though she would be branded a traitor and endanger her family if caught, she fearlessly accepts and carries out her mission. In the fictionalized first-person voice of her subject, Sánchez Korrol chronicles this and Casanova’s many other accomplishments: writing political essays (the first Cuban woman to do so), addressing the United States Congress as a representative of Cuban women fighting for independence, and attempting to internationalize the Cuba Libre movement. Unfortunately, although Casanova is a fascinating character, the author’s scholarly approach burdens the story with so much historical detail that the narrative fails to compel.
Flawed as it is, readers may still find this portrait of the little-known, remarkable revolutionary of interest. (Historical fiction. 13 & up)Pub Date: April 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-55885-765-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Piñata Books/Arte Público
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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