A fiery prison memoir extolling the virtues of rebellion against oppression, against any odds, and no matter what the cost. From the moment of her 1962 arrest for counterrevolutionary activity in Fidel Castro's Cuba, Rodriguez refused to submit to the authority of her captors. Her career as a plantada (one who will not bend) began with mocking the state security troops who came to search her home and ended 19 years later when she was released in an attempt by Castro to score human rights points with the Carter administration. Rodriguez and her fellow political prisoners staged nearly daily protests in order to secure better living conditions and visitation rights, and to avoid being split up through unwanted transfers and forced into the general prison population. Armed only with fists, angry words, the toque de lata (banging loudly on the bars with metal objects), and the hunger strike, the women won battle after battle with prison authorities. Often badly beaten, denied medical treatment, placed in solitary confinement, and starved, the plantadas refused to succumb to the will of their tormentors. They managed to drive one prison administrator insane, burn down a jail as they were being relocated, and resist all attempts to ``reeducate'' them. Rodriguez herself escaped from prison twice—once by pretending to be an evil spirit and walking directly past a superstitious guard—and managed to stay out for six weeks by misleading a secret policeman into believing that she was in contact with the CIA, which was sending a special submarine guided by dolphins to pick her up. Rodriguez recounts her struggle with great passion and without a shred of self pity; only in retrospect does one realize that the best years of her life were needlessly wasted. No honest history of the Cuban revolution and its relation to American foreign policy can be written without reference to works such as this.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13050-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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
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
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