A well-researched and authoritative history of a Cuban exile who became president.
A debut work examines one of the first leaders of Cuba after its independence from Spain.
In this history book, García shares the story of Tomás Estrada Palma, who served as Cuba’s president in the first decade of the 20th century. The volume opens in central New York, where Estrada Palma was living in exile at the time of his election to the presidency, and follows him on his return to his native country before the text diverts into a brief biography in which García does an excellent job of distinguishing the known facts of his life from the many rumors and half-truths that have arisen from the limited information available about his early years. The book also covers Estrada Palma’s involvement in politics and the fight for independence from Spain, leading to his capture as a prisoner of war, and his peripatetic career in Europe and the Americas following his eventual release. The author explains the challenges Cuba’s would-be liberators faced under international law as well as the importance of the lobbying and public relations campaigns Estrada Palma oversaw while living in the United States (“The details of the suffering of the Cuban civilians at the hands of the Spaniards” were publicized “widely by Estrada Palma and the Junta, gaining sympathy to their cause by more and more segments of American public opinion and more and more politicians”). The years after his return to Cuba, including his presidency and resignation, are addressed only briefly in the final chapter; García writes that the book “is limited to his life ‘outside Cuba’ which is least known.” Eliding this period of history, which led to one of several occupations of Cuba by the United States that occurred between the Spanish-American War and the Cuban Revolution, leaves the reader unfamiliar with Cuban history at something of a disadvantage, though it does permit a far more focused narrative than would be possible with greater context. García’s research is evident throughout, with sources thoroughly cited and historical photographs appearing frequently to provide illustration. The author delivers a solid and clearly written summation of one chapter in Cuba’s history, with an emphasis on the long-standing connections to the United States that have shaped the island’s fate.
A well-researched and authoritative history of a Cuban exile who became president.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4787-7391-7
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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