by Gerry Hadden ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 6, 2011
Grim, sobering tales fashioned by a terrific writer brave enough to unearth the real story.
Exciting, heart-wrenching dispatches among the poor and disenfranchised of Haiti and Latin America.
Instead of embarking on a meditation retreat, Hadden suddenly got a dream job offer from NPR and was sent first to Mexico City, just as Vicente Fox was gaining election as president in 2000, then to Haiti, where pro– and anti–Jean-Bertrand Aristide factions were threatening to derail an important election. In succinct, polished chapters, the author recounts his attempts to cover the action, interviewing Fox and watching over time the unraveling of his promised “guest worker” programs sanctioned by the United States. Gradually, Hadden gleaned the more complicated, real story, involving corruption, drug smuggling and waves of perilous human migration to the north. To cover America’s war on drugs, the author dragged a terrified “fixer” with him on a dangerous expedition through the Darien Gap separating Panama from Colombia, through which shipments of guns passed—literally the same guns the U.S. had paid for (“same defects, same serial numbers, different fingers on the triggers”) to conduct previous Central American conflicts. American indifference and inattention both to Latin America and Haiti had sown deep poverty and resentment in the respective regions, and 9/11 did not soften feelings against their untrustworthy neighbor to the north. In Haiti, Hadden attended a ghastly all-night Voodoo ceremony intended to help get Aristide elected, and visited the Duvalier dictators’ former prison on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, where children pranced on the beach and gleefully showed the author human bones that remained from the time of abundant executions. While Hadden was chasing stories for the radio, he also lived in a haunted house in Mexico City, helped a Guatemalan fixer through personal trauma and fell in love with a young married French woman.
Grim, sobering tales fashioned by a terrific writer brave enough to unearth the real story.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202007-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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