by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro with Guido Fernandez & Sonia Cruz de Baltodano ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1996
An anecdotal memoir by the present democratically elected leader of Nicaragua. Chamorro came to politics accidentally. Although born, like her husband, into the ``top echelons of Nicaragua's social structure,'' the descendant of European landowners, she came to sympathize with the plight of the Indian majority after marrying Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, editor of the liberal newspaper La Prensa. Pedro's murder in 1978 at the hands of the government of Anastasio Somoza, whom he had regularly criticized in print, thrust her into the tumult of revolutionary politics. After the Sandinista rebellion overthrew Somoza, Chamorro became a leader of the loyal opposition, watching as Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega ``turned into a black-shirted party boss with a red bandana around his neck.'' Many of her fellow citizens evidently shared her dismay, and she became president of the country, having won by a large margin in a 1990 race thought certain to go to the Sandinistas. (``Theirs,'' she points out, ``was a $20 million campaign handled by a top American public relations team, ours a campaign run on a shoestring budget.'') Among the high points of the book are Chamorro's firsthand reports of infighting among the Sandinista leadership, torn by complex rivalries that led one hero of the war against Somoza, Comandante Zero, to be excluded from postwar rule. She also provides ample—and remarkable—details on the labyrinthine ways in which American aid dollars filtered down to the coffers of democratic organizations, certainly less generously than they did to the contra fighters. Chamorro is sometimes too fond of unmeaty apothegms, and her book is marred by a translation that is at times jarringly unidiomatic. Yet it provides a close look at the inner workings of a government and a nation in transition, led by a woman of obvious bravery and good will. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81055-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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