An obvious labor of love, years in the making, featuring meticulous research and an elegant narrative style.
An intimate history of a “social paradise” that has sorely failed its people.
In his latest, DePalma, a former Latin America correspondent for the New York Times and author of The Man Who Invented Fidel (2006), delivers engaging alternating narratives delineating the lives of regular people during two decades of strife and deprivation. The author shares frankly his bias in this work of revelatory personal histories—his Cuban-born wife was spirited away to America in 1960—and through familial testimony and his own observations, he reveals a country in dire economic distress, its original revolutionary mythology in shambles. DePalma maintains a laser focus on a few ordinary Cubans, including Cary, who was born to a Jamaican migrant and went on to study economic engineering in Ukraine in the 1970s. She returned to a series of promotions in the Cuban workforce and started a family in Guanabacoa, a gritty warehouse neighborhood just across the harbor from Old Havana. Cary’s devotion to Fidel Castro’s revolution was unshaken throughout her life, and she was amply rewarded by the government with housing and health care. Yet by 1994, when the Soviet Union’s aid had dissolved and Cuba was undergoing intense economic hardship, street protests, and reckless attempts to flee the island, Cary recognized that “the classless society Fidel promised was a mirage.” Outside of Cary’s family, DePalma tracks Arturo Montoto, an artist who studied in Moscow and elsewhere, returning to Cuba deeply disillusioned and intent on skirting the system his own way; and several survivors of an ill-fated tugboat that was likely rammed by the Cuban coast guard in July 1994, killing more than 40 people (the Cuban government denied responsibility). DePalma’s fictionlike narrative moves thematically (Realization, Reconciliation, etc.), and the author is especially good at revealing the stunning adaptability of a people thwarted at seemingly every turn.
An obvious labor of love, years in the making, featuring meticulous research and an elegant narrative style. (maps)Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-52244-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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