Flawed as it is, readers may still find this portrait of the little-known, remarkable revolutionary of interest.
Despite the publisher’s description of this as a biography, it is rather a finely detailed historical novel that sticks closely to the facts of this little-known Latin American activist.
Born into a rich, slaveholding Cuban family, Emilia is filled with zeal for freedom from an early age. She refuses to submit to the silent, submissive role of a woman of her time and station, rebelling against her conservative father by championing suffrage for slaves and Cuban independence from Spain. When asked while abroad to deliver contraband papers to her native island home, Emilia sees her chance to be in the thick of the rebellion against Spanish authority. Even though she would be branded a traitor and endanger her family if caught, she fearlessly accepts and carries out her mission. In the fictionalized first-person voice of her subject, Sánchez Korrol chronicles this and Casanova’s many other accomplishments: writing political essays (the first Cuban woman to do so), addressing the United States Congress as a representative of Cuban women fighting for independence, and attempting to internationalize the Cuba Libre movement. Unfortunately, although Casanova is a fascinating character, the author’s scholarly approach burdens the story with so much historical detail that the narrative fails to compel.
Flawed as it is, readers may still find this portrait of the little-known, remarkable revolutionary of interest. (Historical fiction. 13 & up)Pub Date: April 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-55885-765-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Piñata Books/Arte Público
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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