A welcome addition to the literature of Castro and Cuba.
A sympathetic portrait of the younger years of the quixotic Cuban “liberal nationalist.”
Hansen (Latin American History/Harvard Univ.; Guantánamo: An American History, 2011, etc.) underscores Fidel Castro’s (1926-2016) rise in terms of Cuba’s long, frustrating wait for emancipation from foreign powers. “When Cubans thought they had [independence] in their grasp in 1898,” writes the author, “the United States snatched it away, inaugurating six decades of political and economic subservience that haunts Cuba to this day.” Castro always had a larger vision in mind, from growing up the son of a “hardworking, serious, unaffectionate” farmer near Santiago de Cuba to his education next to the Havana elite and his immersion in the violent revolutionary push back of the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. Castro believed that because of his “record of sacrifice” and unswerving dedication to the cause that he alone should be the legitimate leader of the revolutionary struggle. Hansen frames this story of young Castro around the letters the author was granted access to by the aged Naty Revuelta, a like-minded revolutionary who shared a two-year mostly epistolary affair with Castro while he was in prison after the attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba in July 1953. Sharpening his skills as a leader and envisioning a new government for Cuba, Castro needed books; in particular, he asked Revuelta for books on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Hansen emphasizes that Castro did not head to Cuba from exile in Mexico with his ragged band of revolutionaries in 1956 with the intention of engendering a communist regime—only later, because he was shunned by the U.S., did Castro make his alliance with the Soviet Union. Castro believed fervently that Cuba was ripe for revolution and emancipation, and in the disciplined, restless, and ultimately lucky Castro, the country found its leader at last. While the early period of Castro’s life is not the most exciting, the details in the makeup of the man come together for an engaging, astute character study.
A welcome addition to the literature of Castro and Cuba.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3247-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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