An impressionistic portrait of a woman revered and reviled in Argentina, just in time for the scheduled December release of the Madonna film Evita. Eva Per¢n became an icon during her 194552 reign as wife of dictator Juan Per¢n, but one perceived in radically different ways: To some she symbolized all that is good about Argentina; to others, all that is evil. These contradictory perceptions took such hold of the Argentinean imagination that they still run strong 44 years after her death from cancer at the age of 33. Argentine journalist Ortiz paints a picture of Per¢n that provides ammunition for both camps: She was, it seems, a petty, jealous, and shallow woman, who also did remarkable good for Argentina's poor. Ortiz digs deep into Per¢n's background as the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy landowner, and as a mediocre and often desperately poor actress, to explain her contradictory character. But this is no linear biography. Ortiz's Per¢n is like a character in a Gabriel Garc°a M†rquez novel: Her essence shifts according to the situation or the time of day. Ortiz even adopts a M†rquez-like style, offering several different versions of crucial events in Per¢n's life. ``But where is the truth?'' she asks. ``In life, as in drama, it is often found in feelings.'' At the same time, Ortiz inundates the reader with details about the palace intrigues of the Per¢n years, drawn from newly declassified documents, further tantalizing readers with suggestive but unsubstantiated hints of vast payoffs to Eva and Juan Per¢n from postwar Nazi fugitives in exchange for safe haven. Indeed, Ortiz's biography is so awash in suggestive information that it becomes virtually impossible to follow all of the possible threads of Per¢n's life. But, like an impressionist painting viewed from just the right angle, the book does convey an intriguing image of one the most controversial and fascinating women of our century.
Pub Date: Nov. 19, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14599-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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