In the aftermath of his 1969 reelection as president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos began keeping a secret diary. Rempel (who broke the story of this 2,500-page handwritten testament in The Los Angeles Times in 1988) now draws on entries from the manuscript (still classified in the Philippines) to offer intriguing perspectives on how a corrupt, messianic chief executive convinced himself over a three-year span that it was in his troubled country's interest to proclaim martial law and to govern by decree. By the daily journal's account, as well as by the author's focused narrative, Marcos was an arguably paranoid eminence for whom cognitive dissonance became a way of intellectual life. In the wake of student protests and media attacks precipitated by ill- advised economic initiatives and his involvement in a notably sleazy sex scandal, Marcos came to believe that the nation needed him more than the democratic principles to which his regime paid lip service. Leaving little to chance, he created a Red Menace out of whole cloth, taking calculated refuge in anti-Communist, pro- American politics designed to buy time in ongoing battles with political foes—and to pave the way for authoritarian rule. But when it became apparent that those drafting a new constitution could not be bribed or otherwise persuaded to remove bars to his serving more than eight years in office, Marcos started down the twisty road to despotism. With Manila beset by a series of civil disorders, he staged a well-planned coup and seized absolute power on September 23, 1972. It took Filipinos nearly 14 years to oust him and to regain their freedom. A revelatory record that confirms history's verdict on one of the Third World's least appealing strongmen. (Eight pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 9, 1993
ISBN: 0-316-74015-2
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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