A harrowing memoir of life in the Central American killing fields. Born in Appalachia to a Salvadoran mother, novelist Villatoro grew up with stories of entire villages rounded up and slaughtered by government soldiers, and of brutal dictators who sent photographs of their victims as greeting cards with the caption Feliz Matanza—``happy massacre.'' Determined to see whether this world still existed and to explore his Latino heritage, Villatoro traveled to Guatemala as a member of the social-service organization Witness for Peace. He quickly set himself apart from those he calls ``missioners,'' settling into a tiny, isolated village and embracing the people's causes as his own, becoming increasingly critical of the right-wing government in faraway Guatemala City. Along the way he becomes something of an expert in bicycle repair (bicycles being the vehicle of choice in the mountainous countryside) and in coping with the endless grief that surrounds him: Children die of malnutrition, adults of government bullets, nuns are raped, precious crops seized by the government. The world of his mother's tales is still there, Villatoro writes, in all its murderous reality, and this book, recounting the period from 1989 to 1991—long after our government proclaimed that democracy had taken root in Guatemala—is a furious, stunning indictment not only of the brutality of a banana-republic dictatorship, but also of the unwitting complicity of those who are willing to look the other way when that brutality asserts itself. ``The Guatemalan army,'' he writes, ``is famous for not confronting the guerrillas,'' contenting itself with ``burning down whole villages and slaughtering groups of people at a time. Meanwhile, we complain about our refrigerator and how hard life is without electricity.'' Villatoro returned from Guatemala suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and writing this powerful book must have been therapeutic. Its readers, however, will rightly be horrified.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1996
ISBN: 1-55921-164-4
Page Count: 165
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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