Forthright, intimate look at the human toll of Cuba’s “beautiful dream,” marred by rather wooden prose.
Cuban-born political activist Moore recalls his impoverished pre-Castro childhood and subsequent years of exile for speaking out against the country’s entrenched racism.
Born in the small sugar-mill town of Central Lugareño in 1942, the author learned early about Cuba’s brutal racist realities. In his multiethnic neighborhood, Criollos (native Cuban whites) were on top, followed by guajiros (poor white trash), then Negroes (native Cuban blacks) and Yuma (Jamaican, English-speaking blacks like his parents), with piti-piti (Haitians) at the bottom. Young Carlos was often called a pichón, pejorative slang for the offspring of a buzzard that was later adopted by black Cubans as a term of empowerment. After his mother abandoned them, his father married an American who helped them emigrate to New York in 1958, just as President Batista’s repressive regime was about to be toppled. Living in Bedford-Stuyvesant, 17-year-old Moore soon acquainted himself with bohemian ways and easy sex in Greenwich Village and communist politics in Harlem. Inspired by the civil-rights movement and the Black Muslims, he was one of 50 or so demonstrators who invaded the UN Security Council in 1961 to protest U.S. collusion in the assassination of his hero, deposed Congo President Patrice Lumumba. Initially indifferent to the revolution taking place in his homeland, Moore came to believe that Castro was ending racial discrimination in Cuba, and the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 prompted him to return to protect the new order. However, he soon observed that discrimination against blacks had not been eradicated, and he was jailed for his outspoken protests. For two decades he roamed the globe, embracing various revolutionary causes (hurriedly summarized here) until allowed in the late ’90s to travel again to Cuba, where he was shocked and saddened by the harsh living conditions, deprivations and lack of real freedom.
Forthright, intimate look at the human toll of Cuba’s “beautiful dream,” marred by rather wooden prose.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55652-767-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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