A candid firsthand account of an island undergoing a shaky transition.
A journalist witnesses social and political changes in post-Castro Cuba.
Sent to Cuba in 2009 as a CNN cameraman and correspondent, Ariosto arrived in Havana naïve about Cuban culture, politics, and history. What he learned during his two-year stint for CNN, and from many subsequent trips, opened his eyes to the reality and prospects of the island nation. Like BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford, whose recent memoir painted a dark portrait of Cuban life, Ariosto offers a penetrating report of a nation struggling with serious challenges. “In Cuba, everything is corrupt,” one young man told the author, explaining his reasons for wanting to emigrate to America. “They sell an image of a certain life to the world. But it’s a lie. There’s cocaine. There’s prostitution. There’s corruption.” With monthly wages at about $25, Ariosto estimates that about 95 percent of the country participates in a “shadow economy,” where “theft is a relative concept” and procuring supplies or repairs depends on knowing “a guy who knew a guy.” The author himself stocked up on necessities such as batteries and toilet paper during a brief trip home. Social problems abound: Despite Fidel Castro’s aim for economic equality, racial discrimination has led to growing impoverishment among Cuba’s black population. News is censored and information strictly controlled: Even as late as 2016, only 37 percent of Cubans could get online, and an hour of Wi-Fi service costs about a third of a month’s salary, spawning “a patchwork of smuggled-in satellite dishes, a ramshackle network of homegrown, file-sharing entrepreneurs,” and a thriving underground market. That spiderwebbed network, though, was hardly clandestine. In Havana, “eyes were everywhere”: closed-circuit cameras, onlookers and informants in the streets, and government employees at CNN who were expected to submit reports about the journalists. Although Barack Obama’s efforts to forge ties to Cuba inspired a “kumbaya moment,” Donald Trump’s policies are dashing hopes, and housing, food, and medicine shortages create a crisis of confidence among a restive population.
A candid firsthand account of an island undergoing a shaky transition.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-17697-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
