A dark picture of a sun-drenched island.
Sixty years after its revolution, Cuba faces a problematic future.
BBC Moscow correspondent Rainsford makes her literary debut with an insightful and dispiriting portrait of contemporary Cuba. Posted there from 2011 to 2014, and returning twice a year afterward, drawn to Havana’s “warmth and real beauty,” she has observed the island nation in transition as the Castro regime wound down, the U.S. opened trade and travel, and reforms augured hope. Graham Greene’s 1958 novel Our Man in Havana forms a backdrop for Rainsford’s report on the “making and unmaking of Castro’s Cuba.” Greene visited often during Cuba’s decadent, exotic “pleasure era,” when tourists, diplomats, gangsters, and gamblers poured into the “Caribbean Las Vegas.” Rainsford also follows the trail of Ruby Phillips, a New York Times correspondent from 1937 to 1961, witness to the political upheaval that finally impelled her to flee. In contrast to ebullient views of Cuban culture, such as Mark Kurlansky’s Havana, Rainsford characterizes Cuba as a nation “occupied with just staying afloat.” Although some restrictions have been lifted—the internet is more widely accessible—young Cubans see little hope for the future. Despite Raul Castro’s confirmation that he is stepping down, “the words I hear most from both Cubans and expats,” Rainsford writes, “are ‘frozen’ and ‘paralysis.’" “We don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel,” one young man tells her, explaining why so many of his friends are emigrating. “We’re living day to day. It’s all about getting by, not about having plans and ambitions.” After the revolution, abandoned mansions were partitioned into apartments, but by 2013, Cuba had a huge housing deficit, with many buildings classified “as somewhere between poor and perilous.” Even health care and free schooling have become “increasingly hard to fund and fraying around the edges.” Moreover, an atmosphere of suspicion, aroused in part by the Arab Spring uprisings, led to the installations of surveillance cameras outside the homes of known dissidents; “double speak,” a writer tells Rainsford, “is still a reality of everyday life."
A dark picture of a sun-drenched island.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78607-399-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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