Thoughtful, balanced addition to the frequently contentious scholarship of US-Cuban history. (15 b&w illustrations, 2...
Nuanced explanation of a Cold War program that allowed approximately 14,000 Cuban children to enter the US in an effort to save them from Communism, written by one of those refugees.
Operation Pedro Pan was conceived in 1960 to protect the offspring of American-backed activists in the Cuban underground who worried that if they were caught, the children might be sent to the Soviet Union. In a unique move, the US government granted a Catholic priest in Miami permission to waive visas for children under age 16. Until the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, almost 500 unaccompanied children ages 6 to 16 entered America, most going to family friends already living there. In the subsequent 18 months, before the Cuban Missile Crisis shut down the program, the number mushroomed to 14,000. Approximately 6,000 were cared for by friends or relatives in the US, but more than 8,000 were placed in foster homes, orphanages, and other institutions, some waiting decades to be reunited with their families. Torres was one of the lucky ones; her parents soon followed with her younger sibling. In the late 1970s, when the author wished to visit Cuba with a group of Pedro Pans trying to make sense of their past, the exile community issued death threats and murdered one member of the group. “If the battle over children’s minds in the 1960s had been a way to contest [Cuba’s] political future,” writes Torres, “interpreting the exodus became a way to control its history.” For the exile community, the exodus epitomized the supreme sacrifice parents made to save their children from communism; returning to Cuba even for a visit betrayed that sacrifice. The Castro regime, by contrast, viewed the exodus as psychological warfare waged against Cuba by the powerful US; it welcomed the Pedro Pans, though it discouraged contact with family members who had stayed behind.
Thoughtful, balanced addition to the frequently contentious scholarship of US-Cuban history. (15 b&w illustrations, 2 appendices)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8070-0232-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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