A wonderfully nuanced history of the island nation and its often troubled dealings with its gigantic and voracious neighbor.
A fluid, consistently informative history of the long, inextricable link between Cuba and the U.S., well rendered by a veteran Cuban American historian.
Ferrer, a Guggenheim fellow and professor of Latin American studies at NYU, explains that her chronicle is quintessentially “American” because to know Cuba is to grapple with the “sometimes intimate, sometimes explosive, always uneven relationship between the two countries.” The author begins with the “origin myth” of Columbus, who, of course, never even landed in what is now the U.S. Coming ashore in Cuba, he and his men wiped out most of the Indigenous population and inaugurated a slave-based economy of sugar, tobacco, and rum that would decimate the island for centuries. Later, the fledgling U.S. profited enormously from that economy, and Ferrer reminds readers how Cuba supported the Colonial cause against Britain. President John Adams had his eye on annexing Cuba, but he did not want to provoke the British or Spanish; instead, the Monroe Doctrine was enacted in 1823 to keep European powers out of what the U.S. considered its domain. “Cuba—its sugar, its slavery, its slave trade—is part of the history of American capitalism,” notes the author. Such proprietary zeal led the U.S. to help Cuba expel the Spanish, although Ferrer considers it a myth that the Americans won the island its independence from Spain. Indeed, the Americans wouldn’t leave gracefully, forcing the new republic to accept the Platt Amendment. This only exacerbated tensions among revolutionary Cubans, who had grown sick of American exploitation and manipulation, especially since Americans owned so much Cuban land. Ferrer is an endlessly knowledgeable guide, and she is evenhanded in describing Fidel Castro’s revolution and the fervid nationalism and periods of economic hardship after the American embargo. She is especially good in delineating how a distinct Cuban identity was forged over the centuries.
A wonderfully nuanced history of the island nation and its often troubled dealings with its gigantic and voracious neighbor.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5455-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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
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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