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 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | POLITICAL & ROYALTY
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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