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TROPICANA NIGHTS

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE LEGENDARY CUBAN NIGHTCLUB

Informative, although often overwhelming in scope. (16-page b&w photo insert, not seen)

An account of Havana’s internationally renowned nightclub during its 1950s heyday.

Art conservator Lowinger was just a toddler when her parents fled Cuba in the early ’60s. Throughout her childhood, she was haunted by their stories of starry evenings spent in Tropicana’s outdoor cabaret. So when the Los Angeles resident visited Cuba as an adult, saw the glamour of Tropicana for herself, and learned that the performer once known as the “First Lady of Tropicana” now lived in L.A., Lowinger lost no time in visiting the octogenarian Fox. Thus began several years of conversations that comprise the bulk of this text, along with scenes set at the homes of former Tropicana players in New York, Miami, Las Vegas and Cuba. Despite the shared author credit, the story is told in the first person, from Lowinger’s point of view. The best sections portray such quirky nightclub characters as the leprous choreographer whose otherworldly shows sent audience members into trances, a teenaged Czech acrobat who danced cabaret, and former Tropicana owner (and the co-author’s deceased husband) Martín Fox, a gambler and close friend to mafiosi who never left the house without his .38-calibre Smith & Wesson. Too often, though, Lowinger falls into show-biz groupie mentality, boring readers with society-page–style summaries of so-and-so’s mink stole, pearl necklace or terracotta nail polish. The wearer of many of these accoutrements is Fox, a pro-Bush Republican with whom the progressive Lowinger frequently finds herself fighting about politics—also a major preoccupation in corrupt pre-Revolutionary Cuba. The development of the authors’ contentious friendship shares the stage with the Tropicana’s history; Fox’s relationship with housemate Rosa Sanchez provides a third narrative strand that leads to a sweetly romantic ending.

Informative, although often overwhelming in scope. (16-page b&w photo insert, not seen)

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-15-101224-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.

“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”

No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.

A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.

Pub Date: March 2, 2004

ISBN: 0-609-61062-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003

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