A candid firsthand account of an island undergoing a shaky transition.
A journalist witnesses social and political changes in post-Castro Cuba.
Sent to Cuba in 2009 as a CNN cameraman and correspondent, Ariosto arrived in Havana naïve about Cuban culture, politics, and history. What he learned during his two-year stint for CNN, and from many subsequent trips, opened his eyes to the reality and prospects of the island nation. Like BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford, whose recent memoir painted a dark portrait of Cuban life, Ariosto offers a penetrating report of a nation struggling with serious challenges. “In Cuba, everything is corrupt,” one young man told the author, explaining his reasons for wanting to emigrate to America. “They sell an image of a certain life to the world. But it’s a lie. There’s cocaine. There’s prostitution. There’s corruption.” With monthly wages at about $25, Ariosto estimates that about 95 percent of the country participates in a “shadow economy,” where “theft is a relative concept” and procuring supplies or repairs depends on knowing “a guy who knew a guy.” The author himself stocked up on necessities such as batteries and toilet paper during a brief trip home. Social problems abound: Despite Fidel Castro’s aim for economic equality, racial discrimination has led to growing impoverishment among Cuba’s black population. News is censored and information strictly controlled: Even as late as 2016, only 37 percent of Cubans could get online, and an hour of Wi-Fi service costs about a third of a month’s salary, spawning “a patchwork of smuggled-in satellite dishes, a ramshackle network of homegrown, file-sharing entrepreneurs,” and a thriving underground market. That spiderwebbed network, though, was hardly clandestine. In Havana, “eyes were everywhere”: closed-circuit cameras, onlookers and informants in the streets, and government employees at CNN who were expected to submit reports about the journalists. Although Barack Obama’s efforts to forge ties to Cuba inspired a “kumbaya moment,” Donald Trump’s policies are dashing hopes, and housing, food, and medicine shortages create a crisis of confidence among a restive population.
A candid firsthand account of an island undergoing a shaky transition.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-17697-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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