Meandering but heady exploration of a focal point of politics and popular culture.
A semiotic history of one of the world’s most widely reproduced, ideologically fraught photographs.
First-time author Casey revels in the paradoxes behind the global dissemination of Alberto Korda’s famous 1960 snapshot of a defiant Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine-born Cuban insurgent leader. This ubiquitous image has exploited a communist stalwart as a brand to sell vodka and condoms, turned an atheist into a patron saint of the downtrodden and entangled an opponent of private property in an ongoing worldwide copyright dispute. It adorns the T-shirts and dorm walls of millions of college students who have no idea who Guevara was, or that he stood for something more consequential than rebellious cool. Casey offers a comprehensive tour of the icon’s progress. In the mountains of Latin America, a tourist industry retraces Guevara’s circuitous path, while leftist activists and authoritarian governments both claim his legacy. In the streets of Thailand, he shares bumper-sticker space with right-wing icon Rambo, both of them shaggy jungle guerillas. In the galleries of Europe and the United States, artists, conservatives, radicals, gays, religious folk and entrepreneurs battle over what the photo means. The author, Buenos Aires bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswires, sometimes bogs down in the minutiae of Latin American politics, but he maintains a clear focus on what the Korda photo says to him. For all Guevara’s failures as a revolutionary in the Congo and in Bolivia (where he was captured and killed), and for all the violent consequences of his idealism, Guevara remains to Casey a symbol of underdog resilience. Now that the image has been all but divorced from its initial context and meaning, he dreams that it can transcend ideology as well and become an icon of hope.
Meandering but heady exploration of a focal point of politics and popular culture.Pub Date: April 14, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-27930-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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