A thorough and well-documented analysis by Paterson (History/U of Connecticut) of how Castro came to power in Cuba and why the United States failed to stop him. Drawing on U.S., Canadian, and British records, as well as considerable research in private American archives, Paterson launches an unqualified assault on the notion that Fidel Castro was a Communist prior to his accession to power: ``That Castro later- -after victory and repeated crises with the United States—declared himself a Communist cannot erase the pre-1959 record of minimal contact'' between the Cuban Communist Party and Castro's movement. Indeed he argues that Castro's movement ``actually distrusted the Communists because of their one-time sordid alliance with Fulgencio Batista.'' Nor, he notes, was the State Department neglectful of the possibility that Castro might be hiding Communist sympathies. On the contrary, they repeatedly looked into the matter, and the failure of the United States to act more decisively against Castro was in part a reflection of the failure to find any connection between him and the Communist Party or the Soviet Union. A variety of American officials found in him, rather, ``gargantuan ambitions, authoritarian tendencies, and not much in the way of an ideology of his own.'' Paterson believes that the United States showed ``a deadly combination'' of ``ignorance and arrogance'' in dealing with the situation and that its failure to show an evenhanded approach to the civil war in Cuba further stimulated Castro's already lively anti-Americanism. Paterson says that there have been three views of Castro: that he was a ``power hungry manipulator,'' a ``supremely pragmatic politician,'' or, most charitably, that he was a leader in training, feeling his way to a world view. Favoring no one theory, Paterson does show how skillfully Castro maneuvered to achieve his objectives. Paterson does not approach this matter without his own biases (against ``right-wing ideologues'' and officials ``fixated on the Communist issue''), nor did he have access to the Cuban or the Soviet archives; but this is a careful, well-constructed, well- argued, and essential source.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-508630-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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 Yorker staff 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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