A new investigation into the story of Anne Frank and her Jewish family during World War II in Amsterdam concentrates on how they were betrayed after spending twenty-six months in hiding and who may have been responsible. Author Rosemary Sullivan spent much time with the leaders of the recently completed investigation, which ultimately lasted five years and involved two dozen experts in a variety of fields, from artificial intelligence to behavioral science and archiving. Led by Director of Investigation Vince Pankoke, a former FBI investigator, the researchers searched archives in eight countries in an effort to provide the whole truth regarding the fate of Anne Frank and most of her family.
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Main character Eduardo, who has a college education, has been assigned to work for a year with people who cannot read, either for physical or emotional reasons. Seven families are assigned to him, and he must read to each of them for one hour each week. His biggest problem is that he gets tired of reading shortly after he starts each book, and his listeners, disinterested in the selections chosen for them, become bored as he is. The characters include a ventriloquist and his brother, a deaf family with children who can hear, a crippled woman who prefers Daphne du Maurier to Henry James, and a host of others who select different books from those chosen for the program. Poetry becomes a turning point for some, including Eduardo, as all try to deal with the social and political changes in Cuernavaca, where crime is on the upswing. Full of energy, humor, literary references, and themes about why we read and what we read, this book also includes a love story (or two), death, and personal growth – something for everyone. This book is WINNER of Mexico’s highest literary award.
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When an abandoned 50′ yacht is found on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, with bloodstains inside, the chief drug enforcement officer there calls his fellow officer in Managua for help investigating. As clues are revealed about the international implications, the increasingly large cast of characters (helpfully identified in a Dramatis Personae at the beginning of the novel) gets to work. Author Sergio Ramirez is the former Vice President of Nicaragua (1985 – 1990) under Daniel Ortega, and he creates a complex slice of life in that equally complex country. Set in the post-revolution mid-1990s, a politically fraught time, Ramirez shows that political parties have come and changed and gone; friends from the revolution are sometimes working toward different goals; the economy is in tatters, the poor are on their own, and violence is a common theme.
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Giving birth alone in Guadeloupe after her lover, Lansana Diarra, returned to his home in Mali, Simone Némélé waited in vain for the ticket he had promised to send her so that she and their newborn twins, Ivan and Ivana, could join him in Mali. Simone worked in the sugarcane fields, but she tried hard to ensure that her children would have an education and be able to pursue their own interests during their lives. Though they were very different in personality, Ivan and Ivana dearly loved each other, but as they grew up, responding to the political and philosophical movements to which they were exposed, they began to move in different directions. As author Maryse Conde tells their stories, she creates two young people and their friends who feel real to the reader – characters who have many unique personal characteristics – but she clearly wants to tell a bigger story than a simple family saga set in exotic parts of the world. Here Ivan and Ivana ultimately become examples of a broader population of twenty-first century youth who must deal with displacement, racial and gender issues, and political and social issues. Some disaffected youth, as we see here, are often open to radicalization to solve social problems, while some others remain open to change and are willing to help bring it about through more peaceful means.
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When author Marc Petitjean was contacted in Paris by a Mexican writer named Oscar, who wanted to meet him to talk about Marc Petitjean’s father Michel, the author’s interest was piqued. His father, a “left-wing militant” journalist, and associate of avant-garde artists and writers in Paris, had been dead for twenty years. When they met, Oscar pulled out a short manuscript he had written with information acquired from the archives of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, indicating that she had had an affair with Michel Petitjean during the three months she had been in Paris from early January to late March, 1939. An affair between the author’s father and Kahlo was new information to son Marc Petitjohn, who almost dismissed it as “overblown.” Still, Frida Kahlo had given his father one of her best paintings when she returned to Mexico after that three-month visit in 1939. Ultimately, “Oscar’s curiosity kindled my own, and I in turn embarked on researching the lovers’ lives.” The developing love story of Frida Kahlo and Michel Petitjean is inextricably connected with the fraught pre-war political atmosphere of Paris in 1939, the boiling artistic and philosophical ferment of the period, and the close, interconnected friendships among Joan Miro, Kadinsky, Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and “other big cacas of Surrealism.” When she finally departs from France after three months, Michel Petitjean has thought ahead to have letters and notes delivered to her along the way.
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