An intelligent, tender look at Guevara’s human side. See also second wife Aleida March’s just-published (in Spanish)...
A candid, serious memoir by the iconic revolutionary’s first wife.
Gadea met Ernesto Guevara—the nickname “Che” came later—in Guatemala on December 20, 1953. She was a Peruvian political exile working as a government economist; he was a recent medical-school graduate eager to travel and learn about Latin American politics before returning to his native Argentina. A kinship developed between the like-minded two, as they shared Marxist tomes and ideas on how to resist the imperialist oligarchies controlling most of Latin America. Guevara favored the Soviet and Chinese models for a more just society and fervently espoused Sartre and Freud; Gadea introduced him to Walt Whitman’s poetry, helped him find a job and put off his entreaties to get married. It was through Gadea, she claims quite plausibly, that Guevara met the group of Cubans who had participated in the famous July 26, 1953, assault on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago, among them Rául and Fidel Castro. Gadea was briefly jailed after a CIA-backed military coup overthrew Guatemala’s liberal president in January 1954, and the couple fled to Mexico City, where they reunited with the Castro brothers. The coup convinced them all that only armed struggle could liberate the people, and they began to plan the assault on Cuba’s Batista regime that led to the revolutionaries’ historic triumph in 1959. Gadea and Guevara married and had a daughter, Hildita, but the revolution ultimately separated them. He boarded the Granma in November 1956 for Castro’s audacious invasion of Cuba, and by the time Gadea finally arrived in Havana in 1959, Guevara had another woman; they divorced five months later. Gadea died in 1974, and the text offers no information about when this memoir was originally published or why this English-language version is now available.
An intelligent, tender look at Guevara’s human side. See also second wife Aleida March’s just-published (in Spanish) Evocation.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-230-60601-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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