Pedro Zabalaga, with a freshly minted PhD from Cal Berkeley, is a professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Madison (New York), a young man much in demand by American magazines as a commentator on the political situation in South America, and Bolivia, in particular. Pedro is the son of Bolivian hero Pedro Reissig, one of six men massacred by the army as their socialist cell was meeting to plan the overthrow of President Montenegro. Reissig died in the 1970s, when his son was still a small child, and the only legacy young Pedro has is a book his father has written entitled Berkeley. This he regards as “a long letter from Dad to me. By discovering the message he had hidden in the book, I would discover him…” The tight construction, despite the constant changes in time and setting from Rio Fugitivo to Madison, NY, and Berkeley, along with the consistent thematic development, make this a novel which conveys a message without sacrificing the literary qualities which make good mystery novels and their characters come alive.
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Focusing on just two climactic years, 1913 – 1914, Frederic Morton recreates Vienna in all its splendor during the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The vibrant social, intellectual, and cultural life of Vienna is examined within the context of the seething nationalism of the Balkans, the Machiavellian intrigue among the political rulers of the European nations and Russia, and the human frailties of the seemingly larger-than-life national leaders, which assure that the twilight of the empire will eventually be overtaken by darkness. Morton’s seriousness of purpose and his scholarship are undeniable, yet his primary contribution here, it seems to me, is his ability to make historical personages come to life, to make the reader feel that they were real, breathing humans with both virtues and frailties.
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Tuvia, Asael, and Zus Bielski, leaders of a Belarussian Jewish family in the early 1940’s, found life impossible under the German occupation, but they also realized that it would not get any better if they co-operated with the authorities in any way. Leaving their home under cover of night, they daringly escaped into the forest behind their mill, where they intended to live out the war, if they could. Although initially their escape to the forest was purely an attempt to save their own family, the eldest brother, Tuvia Bielski, also wanted to save as many people from the ghetto as possible. Soon other refugees found their way to the forest encampment, and as the community grew larger, he required its members to go back into the ghetto to rescue others: “Those who refuse to go into the ghetto [to rescue other Jews] will be the first to go [from this community]. If they do not do it, they do not have any place here with us.” When the Germans finally retreated from Belarus in the summer of 1944, almost twelve hundred Jewish survivors of the Holocaust shocked the world by materializing from the forest where they had lived in hiding during the German occupation.
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Dense with ideas and complex in its plots, Turing’s Delirium confronts the issues of globalization and the conflicts generated by a perpetual underclass. Within a thriller set in Rio Fugitivo, Bolovia, author Edmundo Paz Soldan, described by Mario Vargas Llosa as “one of the most important Latin American writers of the new generation,” brings social unrest to life in this Third World country. Though young intellectuals have always relied on strikes, demonstrations, and indigenous riots by miners, coca growers, and other laborers to emphasize their grievances—and do so in this novel, too—they now have a new weapon, the computer. Now it is possible for the resistance and revolution to be conducted in cyberspace, and hackers are the front line in the waging of the new war.
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Concentrating on just ten months of Viennese history between July, 1888, and May, 1889, Morton dissects the life of Vienna vertically, revealing its brilliance and its contrasts–its magnificence but ineffable sadness, its political gamesmanship but resistance to social change, its “correctness” of behavior but its anti-Semitism, and its patronage of the arts and sciences but its refusal to acknowledge true originality. Focusing on Crown Prince Rudolf as romantic hero, liberal thinker, and sensitive social reformer, Morton selects details which show Rudolf’s resentment of his figurehead position, his lack of power to effect change, his fears for the future of the monarchy, and his famous suicide at Mayerling.
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