A comprehensive history of recent Nicaraguan-American relations, written by a man who helped shape that ``bloody and conflict-ridden embrace.'' Kagan, a policy advisor in the Reagan administration, is refreshingly self-critical; ``The ambivalent soul of America has consistently sought the fruits of hegemony in this hemisphere but just as consistently balked at the moral costs of exercising it.'' But he is not overly apologetic for the Reagan administration's missteps, which came out of a domino-theory policy of armed confrontation with the avowedly Marxist Sandinista regime in the form of covert action, or what officials called ``the lowball option.'' Thanks to the Iran-contra scandal that arose from the use of that option, Kagan concedes, even Republican stalwarts had to recognize that the Reagan doctrine of containment was a failure. Kagan is a little short on addressing the notorious atrocities committed by the contras, but he openly admits their value in destablizing the Sandinista government. He is long on describing the manifold twists of superpower negotiation that kept Nicaragua on the front burner for so many years, for instance the 1987 US- Soviet summit in which Reagan suggested to Gorbachev that the Soviet Union end aid to Nicaragua as a gesture of goodwill, then went on to announce, incorrectly, that Gorbachev had agreed to a unilaterial Soviet withdrawal of military aid—thus undoing much effort to arrive at a diplomatic solution. Kagan credits Costa Rican president Oscar Arias with helping break the impasses in US- Soviet-Nicaraguan relations, which eventually led to a Bush-era restoration of full diplomatic exchange and the establishment of free elections. Leftist critics of American policy will fault some of Kagan's interpretations. Still, this is a welcome and fluent effort to ``address that most contentious of American foreign policies not as an occasion for polemic but as a serious subject of historical investigation.''
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-02-874057-2
Page Count: 912
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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