by Hugo Chávez with Ignacio Ramonet translated by Ann Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 23, 2016
Monster or savior? Norteamericano leaders accustomed to the view of Chávez as evil incarnate may value this alternate,...
The late Venezuelan leader—or strongman, or dictator, if you like—tells all.
Chávez’s first life is over and done with, ended by a long bout with cancer in 2013. But before it ended, inspired by his friend Fidel Castro to do so, he sat down with French journalist Ramonet for what was supposed to be a “100 hours with…” portrait but wound up filling twice that many hours of tape. Ramonet is nothing if not admiring: he heralds Chávez as an intellectual who “picked out concepts, analyses, stories and examples which he engraved on his prodigious memory, and then beamed out to the public at large through his torrents of speeches and talks.” He also knew his way around a machine gun (and coup d’état, of course), a “Belorussian tractor” or Picasso-an canvas or García Márquez–ian manuscript or baseball diamond, and all with a native cunning born of desperate poverty and a sharp ambition to make something of himself. Here, prompted by Ramonet’s sometimes-softball inquiries—“Did you pray at night before going to bed?”; “Despite your political activity, you didn’t give up baseball”—Chávez recounts his rise to the head of the Venezuelan government, a career trajectory helped along by a willing army and inspired by Bolivarian heroes such as Ezequiel Zamora, who “wanted to change Venezuela and make it a fairer, more just country.” Thus it ever is with reformistas, and so it was when Chávez, early on, declared, “one of the main aims of our revolution was to distribute Venezuelan land in a fairer, more harmonious way.” Venezuela’s 1 percenters and the yanquis who backed them notwithstanding, Chávez seems content to have put an end to the previous oligarchy, which, in terms Castro would doubtless applaud, he calls “a false theoretical construct.”
Monster or savior? Norteamericano leaders accustomed to the view of Chávez as evil incarnate may value this alternate, assuredly self-serving presentation of facts and events.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78478-383-9
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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