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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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