Will the world be a better place without him? Bardach is evenhanded, but, she concludes, it will surely be different—and...
What will the world be like once Fidel Castro leaves it? Noted Cuba watcher Bardach (Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana, 2002, etc.) considers several scenarios in this excellent study.
The world has had a chance to ponder the problem for many years, from the earliest assassination attempts, courtesy of the CIA, to Fidel’s near-fatal bout of peritonitis in 2006. It is the latter episode with which Bardach opens her book, whose subtitle alludes to an oddly fitting novel by Castro’s friend Gabriel García Márquez. Even though Castro lay on death’s door for weeks, he seemingly proved stronger than death, having adopted a regime that shunned alcohol and tobacco and favored brown rice and tea and having committed himself to outlasting every one of his enemies. Bardach’s early pages are peppered with references to those enemies, not least of them Forbes magazine, which reckoned the legendarily spartan Castro to be among the wealthiest dictators in the world. The author also reckons with Castro’s many successes, which include the self-evident fact that South America now abounds in nations that are left-leaning, friendly to Castro’s communist regime and disinclined to participate in any new version of the Cold War pitting Cuba against the United States. Of course, Castro is no longer in power, formally, having transferred state rule to his brother Raúl—by Bardach’s account, Fidel’s rival—who has inaugurated modest reforms. Less modest are the changes pending under the Obama administration, which, apart from the difficult business of the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, appears to be willing to begin the processes of normalizing relations, including allowing travel and the transfer of funds to Cuba. This prospect gives the anti-Castro exile community in Miami—an important node in Bardach’s geography—fits, but even that is changing, as Castro acts out his final days as “Fidel the Wizard, hidden behind the curtain of Cuba’s Oz.”
Will the world be a better place without him? Bardach is evenhanded, but, she concludes, it will surely be different—and with no easy transition in sight.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5150-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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