An important document that evokes the heat in a little-known theater of the Cold War.
A firsthand account of an ill-fated Marxist revolution in the Congo, with an introduction by historian Richard Gott and an afterword by Aleida Guevara March, daughter of Guevara.
Those who romanticize the life of Guevara (d. 1967) will do well to read these unabridged journals. “This is the history of a failure,” he writes of his months of frustration in the jungles of central Africa. In 1965, Guevara brought a hundred or so Cuban guerillas to the Congo with the intent of training the forces of the then-26-year-old Laurent Kabila, who ruled the country recently (until his assassination earlier this year). His mission foundered because of Kabila’s lack of organization. Page after page describes the ineptness of the antigovernment forces, well armed but untrained in the use of their weapons. In describing the revolutionaries’ inexperience, Guevara employs images that recall Joseph Conrad, as when he sees a group of Rwandans manning an artillery piece on a hillside, completely exposed to enemy fire and not in a position to hit any target. In the few battles Cuban forces join, most of their African comrades run at the sound of the first shot or fire their rifles into the air with their eyes closed. In their one success, when the Cubans and Africans manage to ambush an enemy supply column, the victory is bittersweet. The supply trucks carry alcohol; the soldiers become drunk, argue among themselves, and wind up shooting a peasant they believe is a spy. Guevara is constantly outlining how the Africans might improve their campaign. The journals are a literal guidebook for any revolutionary seeking to mount a military campaign against a government in mountainous terrain. How to dig trenches, organize fighting groups, and distribute munitions and medical supplies, all are given a soldier’s attention. Despite the problems, however, Guevara maintains an optimism that mitigates his otherwise dreary tale.
An important document that evokes the heat in a little-known theater of the Cold War.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-3834-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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 Yorkerstaff 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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