Offers a somewhat ponderous view of Chávez as the driven, dedicated inheritor of Simón Bolivar’s mantle.
An American reporter who spent eight years in Venezuela puts the country’s controversial president in the context of its cultural and political history.
This ambitious first book begs inevitable comparison to Hugo Chávez (August 2007) by Venezuelan journalists Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka. Jones’ effort covers much of the same ground: Chávez’s boyhood in the countryside; his military career; the failed 1992 coup that introduced him, via a television address, to the nation; prison time and release; an election victory over a beauty queen rival (no small feat in Venezuela); the foiling of a 48-hour coup against him; and the growing antipathy toward the United States in general and George W. Bush in particular. Jones includes some background material not provided by the Venezuelan authors, such as Chávez’s brief experience working with a group of indigenous people, but none of it is critical; in fact, his conclusions give his take on Chávez much more of an “authorized” feel. For instance, Jones supports Chávez’s claim that the United States directly aided the attempt to remove him and rejects the idea that the president might try to impose a Cuban-style communist government on his country. Perhaps the most striking disparity between the two books, however, is the emphasis placed here on the notion that dark-skinned, mixed-ancestry Chávez is a mold-breaker in a racist society whose “light-skinned elite” have traditionally not shared power. What Marcano and Tyszka call Chávez’s “magical appeal” to the working class is explained by Jones as simply due to the fact that he is the first president physically to resemble many of its members. While allowing that Chávez does have, by all accounts, a “messianic” streak, the author also endorses his innovative social programs without major exception.
Offers a somewhat ponderous view of Chávez as the driven, dedicated inheritor of Simón Bolivar’s mantle.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58642-135-9
Page Count: 532
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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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