Lively, well-written and especially useful to Cuba scholars as they chart the progress of a country in what many are betting...
Wide-ranging life of a Cuban Croesus and a graceful history of the island during the last century.
Julio Lobo wasn’t the only man to have earned a fortune in Cuba, as Financial Times contributor Rathbone writes, but he was the only one to have earned an adage: “ser rico como un Julio Lobo—to be as rich as Julio Lobo.” Born in 1898, the year of Cuba’s independence from Spain, Lobo was the wealthiest man on the island until the Castro Revolution did away with wealthy men. He lived a Citizen Kane–like existence in a palace made of Carrara marble bedded on sand from the Nile River, wooed the most beautiful women and consumed the finest food and drink. Yet, by the author’s account, Lobo was quintessentially lonely. Moreover, he was psychologically bound up in a collection that, when it was in one place, was a trove for historians—“the largest holding of Napoleonica outside France, including one of the emperor’s back teeth and his death mask.” Lobo’s fascination with Napoleon spoke to talent in negotiating the intricacies of power on the island, and he flourished in a time of corrupt dictators without being overly corrupt himself. He also generously opened his purse to the then-struggling guerrillas who would come to power in the revolution of 1959. Lobo even acted as a more-or-less informal advisor to Che Guevara when the latter took over as head of Cuba’s central bank, a job for which the Argentinean doctor had no credentials. An odd couple, to be sure—but, writes Rathbone, “[b]oth were lucid and deeply rational men,” and both took their work very seriously. Things did not end well for either—but that is a story that Rathbone relates with skill as he traces Lobo’s far-reaching involvement in almost every aspect of the island’s 20th-century history.
Lively, well-written and especially useful to Cuba scholars as they chart the progress of a country in what many are betting to be the last days of Castroism.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59420-258-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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