Some awkward prose and clashing metaphors mar the author’s heartfelt rendering of her Cuban adventure.
Political antagonisms fail to thwart a cross-cultural love affair.
In April 2001, a few months after her mother died of inoperable liver cancer, Simón took a trip to Cuba with a friend, a journey that proved both eye-opening and life-changing. In her debut memoir, the author recounts both her mother’s death and the trip, which was planned “as an off-path adventure,” featuring salsa and margaritas, and became, in her grief, “an escape, a desperately needed break from life without Mom.” The loss of her mother, she reflects, “had redefined me, springing brain circuits loose.” Noticing the poverty and repression in Castro’s Cuba—food was rationed, all workers were paid equally low wages, Cuban citizens were forbidden to use hotel facilities, and armed police were everywhere—the author wondered “why people even bothered going to school at all, despite the famously good, free education.” Yet despite these conditions, Cubans evinced much laughter, playfulness, and joy. Maybe, she thought, she could revive those feelings in herself—and she did after meeting Luis, a strikingly handsome taxi driver. The attraction was mutual and, she repeatedly attests, electrifying. When Luis first kissed her, she felt “an electric shock.” He made her flash “like a bulb,” and once, when he asked her to take a walk, she felt “a surge of energy…from my chest into my ears.” Their attraction seemed nothing less than “delirium...as we carried on in our escalating and hyper interest.” Their love, however, was threatened by travel restrictions imposed by their respective countries. Simón rushed back into Luis’ arms each time she arrived in Havana, and she wept on each plane ride back to the U.S. Overcoming daunting legal hurdles, they finally married, and Luis managed to come to Savannah, where their family lives.
Some awkward prose and clashing metaphors mar the author’s heartfelt rendering of her Cuban adventure.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5107-0255-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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 Yorkerstaff 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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