An important document that evokes the heat in a little-known theater of the Cold War.
A firsthand account of an ill-fated Marxist revolution in the Congo, with an introduction by historian Richard Gott and an afterword by Aleida Guevara March, daughter of Guevara.
Those who romanticize the life of Guevara (d. 1967) will do well to read these unabridged journals. “This is the history of a failure,” he writes of his months of frustration in the jungles of central Africa. In 1965, Guevara brought a hundred or so Cuban guerillas to the Congo with the intent of training the forces of the then-26-year-old Laurent Kabila, who ruled the country recently (until his assassination earlier this year). His mission foundered because of Kabila’s lack of organization. Page after page describes the ineptness of the antigovernment forces, well armed but untrained in the use of their weapons. In describing the revolutionaries’ inexperience, Guevara employs images that recall Joseph Conrad, as when he sees a group of Rwandans manning an artillery piece on a hillside, completely exposed to enemy fire and not in a position to hit any target. In the few battles Cuban forces join, most of their African comrades run at the sound of the first shot or fire their rifles into the air with their eyes closed. In their one success, when the Cubans and Africans manage to ambush an enemy supply column, the victory is bittersweet. The supply trucks carry alcohol; the soldiers become drunk, argue among themselves, and wind up shooting a peasant they believe is a spy. Guevara is constantly outlining how the Africans might improve their campaign. The journals are a literal guidebook for any revolutionary seeking to mount a military campaign against a government in mountainous terrain. How to dig trenches, organize fighting groups, and distribute munitions and medical supplies, all are given a soldier’s attention. Despite the problems, however, Guevara maintains an optimism that mitigates his otherwise dreary tale.
An important document that evokes the heat in a little-known theater of the Cold War.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-3834-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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