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 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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