In this affecting nonfiction account, a woman describes her civil suit against the Chilean death-squad commander who murdered her brother.
When Pinochet took over Chile in a 1973 military coup, Zita Cabello-Barrueto’s brother Winston Cabello, 28, an economist in Allende’s government, was no political activist. It didn’t matter. He became an early victim of the notorious Caravan of Death, the Chilean army death squad. Along with a dozen other political prisoners, he was driven to the desert, murdered and buried in an unmarked grave. After having immigrated to the United States, where Cabello-Barrueto worked her way up from janitor to professor, she learned years later that the man responsible, Armando Fernandez Larios, was living in Miami, Florida. A criminal case wasn’t possible, but (with pro bono legal help and other assistance) Cabello-Barrueto filed a civil suit against him, tracking down and interviewing many witnesses herself. In 2003, a federal jury unanimously found Fernandez liable for the summary execution, torture and inhumane and degrading treatment of Winston—as well as crimes against humanity. Damages awarded were $4 million, but Cabello-Barrueto writes, the money was never the point. “We knew we would never be paid.” Fernandez remains free. By publishing testimony not presented in court, Cabello-Barrueto hopes to complete the historical record. Her unflinching account shows not just one family’s grief, but also how fear and self-interest play into the interests of the powerful, so that for many Chileans, death squads were an acceptable alternative to Allende’s breadlines. And though constantly motivated by the drive to know why her brother died, she has to conclude that his death was arbitrary. “It is possible. That is all you need to know,” says one military figure she interviewed. Cabello-Barrueto also shows how tangled, painful, tedious and disillusioning the legal process can be (although her exhaustive details can tax reader interest). Her overall mood is optimism, but the book ends on a plaintive note: The U.S. still has not answered Chile’s request to extradite Fernandez.
Cabello-Barrueto succeeds in becoming a voice for her brother and other victims of repressive states.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500256753
Page Count: 328
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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PERSPECTIVES
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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