In a vivid, fascinating portrait of Cuba's ``Maximum Leader,'' Quirk (The Mexican Revolution and the Catholic Church, 1910-29, 1973, etc.—not reviewed) traces Castro's evolution from marginalized radical to Communist dictator. Castro, the son of an uncultured nouveau riche farmer from Spain, was educated in religious schools and at the Univ. of Havana, where he received a law degree and where, though undistinguished academically, he had experiences important for his radical career: He joined several groups of insubordinate student- hoodlums, and he organized a protest that resulted in the burning of buses. In recounting his subject's career as a radical (after Batista seized power in 1952, Castro abandoned his law practice for full-time radical politics), Quirk emphasizes the utter ordinariness of events that Castro later invested with mythological significance—particularly his unsuccessful ragtag attack on the Moncada barracks in July 1952; his friendship with the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara; his 1956 return to Cuba with 90 followers in the leaky yacht Granma (which resulted in the immediate capture or death of most of Castro's force); and his struggle in the Sierra Maestra against increasingly demoralized government forces. Quirk shows that Castro, though long influenced by Marxist writings, identified his movement as Communist only after repeated confrontations with the US over American business activity in Cuba. Castro militarized the nation's economy and, in accordance with Soviet policy, tried to export revolution to the rest of Latin America as well as to Africa, even while brutally stifling civil liberties and dissent at home. Quirk ends with a look at Castro's refusal to reform his political system despite declining living standards and international isolation in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union: ``By all appearances...[Castro] would see Cuba destroyed before he gave up his authority and his prerogatives.'' A balanced, well-written, and definitive examination of the long, turbulent, and often unheroic career of the architect of Cuba's revolution. (Photographs)
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03485-2
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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