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
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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