The author’s shrewd insights into international relations, national politics and human nature make this a valuable text even...
Searing account of life in Chile under the general who overthrew a socialist president in 1973, then hung onto power through internal terrorism for nearly two decades.
Currently Chile’s ambassador to the United Nations, Muñoz served as a young man in the government of President Salvador Allende. Pinochet, then commander of the Chilean army, despised Allende both for his vast education and his democratic tendencies. On September 11, 1973, the general led a military coup that was, the author writes, “Chilean-made [but] undoubtedly U.S.-sponsored,” a statement substantiated by the Nixon administration’s haste in recognizing the Pinochet regime a mere two weeks after its violent overthrow of a democratically elected government. Fearing for his life, Muñoz ended up in the United States at the University of Denver, where his classmates in the international-relations program included brainy, hardworking Condoleezza Rice. He could not turn his back on Chile, however, eventually choosing to return and work against the murderous totalitarian government. Although horrified by the general’s thuggery, Muñoz is objective enough to credit Pinochet with helping improve the national economy. This was no small feat, and University of Chicago economists played a significant role in it; the account of their involvement in Chilean policymaking under an immoral dictatorship provides a fascinating glimpse of academics embroiled in the messy real world. The author doubts that Pinochet ever actually understood the policies of “the Chicago boys,” since in his view the dictator was not very bright and never had an original thought. Still, Pinochet somehow managed to win the allegiance of those far more intelligent than he and thus maintain power in the face of massive internal and external opposition. The narrative seethes with palpable tension, as Muñoz shows Chile’s citizens desperately hoping for an existence free from fear.
The author’s shrewd insights into international relations, national politics and human nature make this a valuable text even for readers who have rarely thought about Chile.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-465-00250-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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