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
An alarming and inspiring message that will hopefully spur much-needed action.
The story of one woman’s call to ease the atrocious human suffering in the Congo.
Settling in Portland, Ore., in her late 20s, photographer Shannon thought her life was in place. Everything shifted, however, when she learned of the war and unthinkable tragedies taking place in the Congo, a conflict borne out of the Rwandan genocide that had become muted in the international community. Already running from her father’s death, she decided to run 30 miles and raise 30 sponsorships for Congolese women through Women for Women, an international NGO for female survivors of war. Hoping to spark a movement, she created a foundation called Run for Congo Women and traveled through the country to meet the women she helped sponsor. Shannon presents images of the uncensored horror stories that, to many Congolese, have become regrettably routine: Congo’s vile colonial history and the Rwandan genocide spillover that has caused the murders of more than five million Congolese people; children forced to kill and rape in their own communities; daily child deaths from easily curable illnesses; grisly murders of men and children in front of their wives and mothers; families burned alive inside their homes; women who must choose between rape and watching their children starve. The author writes from a place of determination and clarity, despair and breakdown, overwhelming love and hope. Juxtaposing brutality with beauty, Shannon’s direct prose is a stirring reminder that these horrors are real and ongoing.
An alarming and inspiring message that will hopefully spur much-needed action.Pub Date: April 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58005-296-2
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
An above-average memoir that itself serves as the musician’s next career chapter.
A rapper shows that her facility with language and revelation extends beyond music.
Though the memoir proceeds pretty much chronologically, it is more like a series of pieces, each with its own focus, than a cohesive narrative. A Minneapolis transplant to New York, raised by a Puerto Rican mother and a Caucasian father, with a degree in philosophy and a background in medical writing, Dessa (Spiral Bound, 2009, etc.) has consistently transcended conventional stereotyping, and her writing should command interest even from readers who know nothing of her work with the Doomtree collective and her solo releases. By her own admission, she came to music late—“in my midtwenties I was old enough to be a retired rapper—inexperienced and without good odds on making it a sustainable career. She succeeded through what she calls “the Tinker Bell model. She’s only real because she is clapped into existence….The Tinker Bell model is the nuclear option. It taps every reserve. It permits no Plan Bs.” Beyond artistic drive, the obsessive undercurrent of this memoir is her on-again, off-again romance with a crewmate (and soul mate?) identified only as X; the relationship was incredibly passionate but so combustible it couldn’t sustain itself. Dessa’s mother and father were equally driven in unorthodox directions, as the former started raising cattle and the latter devoted years to building his own one-man airplane. Some of the narrative is a standard tour diary, what it’s like to be on the road, where, she quotes a Doomtree rapper, you’re “a traveling T-shirt salesman.” She writes of an assignment from the New York Times Magazine in which she was to visit New Orleans like a tourist (so different from visiting as a touring musician), and she writes of her sidelights delivering lectures and performance pieces and of her invitation to contribute to “The Hamilton Mixtape.” It has been a singular career, and it is by no means over.
An above-average memoir that itself serves as the musician’s next career chapter.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4229-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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