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Anne Bartlett

NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Black Flags, Blue Waters

Review by Anne Bartlett

Pity poor, honest Robert Snead. A justice in colonial Philadelphia in 1697, he was determined to enforce the laws against piracy by arresting members of pirate Henry Avery’s crew who were living in the city. But the governor’s daughter was married to one of them. Snead’s fellow justice also had a relative married to a pirate. They blocked him at every turn. Ultimately, the sheriff let the criminals “escape.” A disgusted Snead gave up.

In a nutshell, that’s how the so-called “Golden Age” of piracy from 1680-1726 became so golden. American colonists not only tolerated piracy, they built their economy on its loot. As author Eric Jay Dolin illustrates in his gripping Black Flags, Blue Waters, colonists and pirates were “partners in crime”—until their interests diverged.

Dolin, who has previously written popular narratives about whaling, the fur trade and opium trafficking, finds another can’t-miss subject in the adventures of Kidd, Bonnet, Blackbeard and their ilk. Dolin makes it fresh by focusing on the interaction between pirates and the British colonies. His evidence is irrefutable: pirate cash and stolen goods were invaluable to colonial ports.

As long as the pirates were attacking Spanish and Muslim ships, the colonists were delighted to abet them. But, inevitably, the authorities got around to cracking down, and the pirates sought new victims closer to home. The culmination was Blackbeard’s blockade of Charleston, which led to the exciting chase that ended in his death. The colonists were now pirate hunters.

Many of the infamous pirates were hanged, and they didn’t leave behind buried treasure. But Dolin ends with real treasure: the discovery in 1984 of the wreck of Samuel Bellamy’s pirate ship Whydah off Cape Cod, producing “a torrent of artifacts.” Our fascination with the robbers who sailed under the black flags is unlikely to end any time soon.

Pity poor, honest Robert Snead. A justice in colonial Philadelphia in 1697, he was determined to enforce the laws against piracy by arresting members of pirate Henry Avery’s crew who were living in the city. But the governor’s daughter was married to one of them. Snead’s fellow justice also had a relative married to a pirate. They blocked him at every turn. Ultimately, the sheriff let the criminals “escape.” A disgusted Snead gave up.

NonfictionHistory

A century in Czechoslovakia

Review by Anne Bartlett

In a sense, The Last Palace was conceived when Norman Eisen, U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic under Barack Obama, was lying under a table. Eisen had just had a thought-provoking phone conversation with his mother, Frieda, a Jewish Czech-American and Holocaust survivor who was reluctant to visit him at his gorgeous ambassador’s “palace” in Prague because of her harrowing memories of the Nazi and Communist years. A table in his new palatial home had an inventory label underneath it signifying that it had been used by the Nazis, and Eisen wanted a closer look. As he peered up, he realized that it also had marks affixed by the wealthy Jewish family that built the mansion and, more recently, by the U.S. government. There it was, on a piece of furniture: the Czech experience of the 20th century.

Eisen, ambassador from 2011 to 2014, has written a genuinely exciting history of the era, seen through the lives of Frieda and four people who lived in the mansion: Otto Petschek, the Jewish magnate who built it; Rudolf Toussaint, the general in charge of German troops in Nazi-occupied Prague; Laurence Steinhardt, the first postwar U.S. ambassador; and Shirley Temple Black, child superstar-turned-ambassador, stationed there during the Velvet Revolution.

Based on voluminous research, the book offers a detailed, novelistic view of stirring times and impressive characters. For all his riches, Petschek is ultimately a sad figure, unable to understand the fragility of his world. Even the conflicted Toussaint evokes some modest sympathy, as he loathed the Nazis.

Steinhardt and Black, however, were inarguably heroic. Steinhardt fought to preserve democracy; when he lost, he helped endangered friends escape. With impeccable timing, Black publicly supported the dissidents who overthrew the Communists. And through it all, we follow the indomitable Frieda, who survives the Holocaust to raise the American son whose success completes her family’s journey from persecution to prominence.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In a sense, The Last Palace was conceived when Norman Eisen, U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic under Barack Obama, was lying under a table. Eisen had just had a thought-provoking phone conversation with his mother, Frieda, a Jewish Czech-American and Holocaust survivor who was reluctant to visit him at his gorgeous ambassador’s “palace” in Prague because of her harrowing memories of the Nazi and Communist years. A table in his new palatial home had an inventory label underneath it signifying that it had been used by the Nazis, and Eisen wanted a closer look. As he peered up, he realized that it also had marks affixed by the wealthy Jewish family that built the mansion and, more recently, by the U.S. government. There it was, on a piece of furniture: the Czech experience of the 20th century.

NonfictionHistory

Echoes of imperialist exploration

Review by Anne Bartlett

In 1542, the Omagua tribe of the Amazon River basin made a terrible strategic mistake: They saved the lives of a band of starving Spanish explorers. After the Spaniards recovered, they continued upriver, pillaging and killing. So began the violence and despoliation that continue today. The Omagua are barely hanging on; many other tribes are gone forever.

Chris Feliciano Arnold’s The Third Bank of the River presents a wide-ranging panorama of this vast region in western Brazil, so full of both promise and suffering. Combining history, contemporary reporting and memoir, Arnold entwines the stories of the region’s Amazon River basin’s endangered indigenous tribes, the violence of the jungle city Manaus and its economy of environmental exploitation and cocaine trafficking.

The days when rubber barons worked natives to death are gone, but the tribes still face threats—particularly from the diseases of Caucasians. In one astonishing incident from 2014, an isolated tribe under pressure from illegal loggers raided a less isolated village, but were gravely sickened by contact with stolen clothing.

In Manaus, the paramilitary police have become a gang competing with drug cartels. In retaliation for the killing of an off-duty cop, death squads of officers assassinated dozens of random victims in drive-by shootings during 2015’s “Bloody Weekend.” Arnold follows the investigation into the massacre, and uncovers the life of one victim—an ordinary man who loved to dance.

In these travels, Arnold is undergoing his own process of self-discovery. Born in Brazil, then adopted as an infant by an Oregon family, he sees how easily he could have been one of the lost boys of Manaus. But all is not hopeless: public health experts treat the tribes, anthropologists debate how best to protect them, missionaries do their best to help. Brazil’s political system may be in crisis, but decent individuals persevere.

In 1542, the Omagua tribe of the Amazon River basin made a terrible strategic mistake: They saved the lives of a band of starving Spanish explorers. After the Spaniards recovered, they continued upriver, pillaging and killing. So began the violence and despoliation that continue today. The Omagua are barely hanging on; many other tribes are gone forever.

NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Those who fail to remember history

Review by Anne Bartlett

Robert Barnwell Rhett Sr. certainly had a knack for speedy reinvention. The Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper owner was among the most vehement proponents of slavery and secession before the Civil War. Yet only a decade later, he was denying that slavery was the main motive behind the conflict. Rhett helped lead the way for generations of white Southerners who propagated the “Lost Cause” myth: the gauzy tale of kindly slave masters who had fought only for states’ rights. It was a pervasive myth in white Charleston, where “willful forgetting,” as authors Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts call it, became a way of life.

The married historians’ book Denmark Vesey’s Garden is a remarkable exploration of the radically different memories of antebellum Charleston that coexisted for 100 years. In white Charleston’s memory, your granddad wasn’t a slave trader, and slaves were happy “servants.” Old plantations were marketed to visitors as “gardens.” Black Charlestonians begged to differ. Immediately after the war, when it was still safe, they held citywide freedom festivals. Later, with Jim Crow laws grinding them down, they taught black history in segregated schools, quietly telling their grandchildren how they really felt about Old Master.

Starting with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the two worlds finally collided. Change was slow and fitful, but it was real. One emblematic example: A statue of Denmark Vesey, the leader of an 1822 slave rebellion, was erected in a public park in 2014, though not without contentious debate.

Kytle and Roberts caution against complacency in the face of racism. Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine African-Americans in Vesey’s old church in 2015, had visited the city’s historical sites ahead of the massacre—and learned all the wrong lessons.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Robert Barnwell Rhett Sr. certainly had a knack for speedy reinvention. The Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper owner was among the most vehement proponents of slavery and secession before the Civil War. Yet only a decade later, he was denying that slavery was the main motive behind the conflict. Rhett helped lead the way for generations of white Southerners who propagated the “Lost Cause” myth: the gauzy tale of kindly slave masters who had fought only for states’ rights. It was a pervasive myth in white Charleston, where “willful forgetting,” as authors Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts call it, became a way of life.

NonfictionBiography

Model, muse and trailblazer

Review by Anne Bartlett

One of the French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s favorite models was Suzanne Valadon, a working-class teen raised in the Montmartre district of Paris. In his paintings, she’s always softly pretty, vibrant, approachable. Aside from her physical appeal, Valadon was herself a talented artist. Her first serious self-portrait couldn’t have been more different from Renoir’s depiction: She portrayed herself as spiky and tough, with a skeptical look and sharp nose.

That might give you some hint as to why you know Renoir’s work but perhaps have never heard of Valadon. She became an admired professional painter, but she was never widely popular. She was too unsparing, too “unfeminine.” The title of Catherine Hewitt’s biography of Valadon, Renoir’s Dancer, helps place her in the artistic universe, but the book is very much about the Valadon of the self-portraits.

Born in 1865, the incorrigible Valadon was the illegitimate daughter of a linen maid. She became a circus acrobat, then a successful model—and the probable lover of Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, among others. The latter recognized her talent and helped her connect with Edgar Degas, who became her tireless mentor.

She also had an illegitimate child, Maurice Utrillo, an emotionally troubled, alcoholic artist whose charming cityscapes made them both rich. Valadon eventually married one of her son’s friends, who was 20 years younger than her, and the trio lived a tumultuous life together.

You can’t go wrong with material like that, and Hewitt excels at re­creating the atmosphere of Montmartre as it evolved from bohemian enclave to tourist nightspot. The reader tags along with Valadon to heady establishments like Le Chat Noir and the Lapin Agile, where she stuns the men with her verve and intelligence. Hewitt introduces us to a frank, generous woman and bold artist who painted more nudes than babies. She ultimately overcame the prejudices: When she was 71, the French nation bought several of her works, and her paintings now hang in museums around the world.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

One of the French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s favorite models was Suzanne Valadon, a working-class teen raised in the Montmartre district of Paris. In his paintings, she’s always softly pretty, vibrant, approachable. Aside from her physical appeal, Valadon was herself a talented artist. Her first serious self-portrait couldn’t have been more different from Renoir’s depiction: She portrayed herself as spiky and tough, with a skeptical look and sharp nose.

NonfictionTrue Crime

An investigation as horrifying as it is necessary

Review by Anne Bartlett

In a Seattle suburb in 2008, an 18-year-old girl woke up to find a stranger with a knife in her apartment bedroom. He bound, blindfolded and gagged her, then raped her and photographed the assault. After he left, she reported the rape to the Lynnwood, Washington, police. They didn’t believe her. They thought Marie had invented the story to get attention and charged her with making a false report.

Two years later in Colorado, the same man raped another woman. Then another. And another. Luckily, the detectives there believed the victims and investigated aggressively. But the harm was done: A serial rapist was at large because the Lynnwood police had failed to do their job properly.

It’s a horrifying story, but not a unique one. In A False Report, an expansion of their Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica article “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” journalists T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong posit that centuries of bias against women’s rape allegations continue to infect the U.S. legal system. Much progress has occurred, but not enough and not everywhere. Miller and Armstrong delve deeply into serial rapist Marc Patrick O’Leary’s crimes and the investigation that eventually caught him, weaving together Marie’s traumatic experience and the meticulous work of two female detectives and their colleagues that ultimately put O’Leary in prison—and humiliated the Lynnwood police.

After years of depression and drifting, Marie was exonerated. The cops, foster parents and former friends who had refused to believe her apologized, and she went on to a better life. But nothing could really make up for the years lost and anguish endured.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In a Seattle suburb in 2008, an 18-year-old girl woke up to find a stranger with a knife in her apartment bedroom. He bound, blindfolded and gagged her, then raped her and photographed the assault. After he left, she reported the rape to the Lynnwood, Washington, police. They didn’t believe her. They thought Marie had invented the story to get attention and charged her with making a false report.

HistoryAmerican History

An unlikely friendship on the frontier

Review by Anne Bartlett

Talk about strange bedfellows: William "Buffalo Bill" Cody and George Armstrong Custer were buddies who went bison hunting together. After Custer was killed at Little Bighorn, Cody did his utmost to avenge his death. But just nine years later, Cody was courting Sitting Bull, the instigator of that battle, to appear in his Wild West show. And when the great Lakota chief was in his own final confrontation with white men, Cody tried unsuccessfully to save his life. They, too, were friends.

Enemies turned comrades, in less than a decade? Cody and Sitting Bull only worked together for a few months in 1885, but it's a fascinating chapter in the lightning-fast transition from Wild West reality to traveling circus. In her compelling Blood Brothers, Deanne Stillman, an expert on the American West, examines their lives to explore the era’s complexities.

When you delve into it, their connection seems less odd. Both were genuinely charismatic men, natural leaders with generous natures. Both also had a shrewd eye for economic opportunity. Sitting Bull was the product of a lifetime of betrayal by whites; Cody understood that, and played it straight with him.

Their ultimate symbiosis was not unique. Even as whites vilified Native Americans, they flocked to get Sitting Bull’s autograph. And Cody had no trouble hiring Native Americans. Forced onto reservations, many were destitute and eager for even the simulation of their old lives.

Stillman also shows that a third person was crucial to the relationship between the two men: Annie Oakley. Both were a bit in love with that remarkable woman, and her story is as riveting as theirs.

Cody survived long enough to try a comeback in Hollywood, making a documentary that retold Sitting Bull’s death and the massacre at Wounded Knee. It failed commercially and is now lost.

William "Buffalo Bill" Cody and George Armstrong Custer were buddies who went bison hunting together. After Custer was killed at Little Bighorn, Cody did his utmost to avenge his death. But just nine years later, Cody was courting Sitting Bull, the instigator of that battle, to appear in his Wild West show. And when the great Lakota chief was in his own final confrontation with white men, Cody tried unsuccessfully to save his life. They, too, were friends. 
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Lone Star saga

Review by Anne Bartlett

Roger D. Hodge couldn’t get out of Texas fast enough. After a boyhood spent doing the things that a South Texas kid from a ranching family does—working with livestock, hell-raising in Mexico—he drove off to college at 18 and didn’t look back. He never planned to become what he calls a “professional Texan.”

But it’s not easy to extract your homeland from your heart. The legendary Texas borderland ranch culture is fading, and Hodge takes an unsparing look at how it developed, what it meant and how it’s dying in Texas Blood.

Texas Blood, a title that refers to the blood of Hodge’s ancestors and the blood of Southwestern violence, is a heady, sometimes humorous mélange of family history, memoir, research and travelogue. In the course of the book, Hodge retraces his forebears’ path south from Missouri, drives pretty much the entirety of the Rio Grande Valley, interviews border patrol agents and his grandma, hangs out with Mexican-American pilgrims at the Cristo Rey shrine and explains why Cormac McCarthy’s novels are more realistic than not.

Hodge’s first Texas ancestor, Perry Wilson, was a typical mid-19th-century roamer, making perilous journeys to California and Arizona as well as Texas. Wilson’s descendants stuck around the general vicinity of Del Rio, Texas. Hodge illustrates what their lives were like with contemporaneous books, letters and diaries, the most moving stories coming from ordinary settlers.

Border history is savage. Everyone was killing everyone: Spanish versus Native Americans, Comanches versus American settlers, scalp bounty hunters versus anyone they could pretend was a Native American. But people like the Wilson-Hodge clan worked incredibly hard and built a community worth remembering in a beautifully austere land.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Roger D. Hodge about Texas Blood.

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Roger D. Hodge couldn’t get out of Texas fast enough. After a boyhood spent doing the things that a South Texas kid from a ranching family does—working with livestock, hell-raising in Mexico—he drove off to college at 18 and didn’t look back. He never planned to become what he calls a “professional Texan.” But it’s not easy to extract your homeland from your heart. The legendary Texas borderland ranch culture is fading, and Hodge takes an unsparing look at how it developed, what it meant and how it’s dying in Texas Blood.

NonfictionMemoir

An ode to grief and resilience

Review by Anne Bartlett

In old Latvia, Inara Verzemnieks tells us, people believed that the dead returned home once a year to see how everyone was doing. The living couldn’t see them, but they felt their presence, maybe even talked to them. It was a source of great comfort.

After decades of upheaval and migration, the traditional beliefs have gone underground. But Verzemnieks, the Latvian-American granddaughter of a refugee, understands their value and finds her own comfort through the personal journey she recounts in Among the Living and the Dead.

Verzemnieks’ grandmother Livija fled Riga, Latvia, with her two children during World War II, making her way to a displaced persons camp in Germany. She was joined there by her war-wounded husband. After much struggle, they were resettled in the United States. As the family adjusted, Livija’s relatives overseas in Latvia were undergoing their own torment: They were exiled by the Soviets to Siberia for years, returning only to find that they had lost their ancestral farm.

Verzemnieks was raised largely by her beloved grandparents, who existed somewhere between the U.S. and their memories of rural childhoods. After her grandmother’s death, Verzemnieks visited Livija’s sister in the old village in an attempt to unravel family mysteries.

Verzemnieks is an exquisite writer who weaves together tales of old Latvia and her own discoveries in lyrical prose. Slowly, carefully, she coaxes her great-aunt into talking about Siberia. She learns more about her grandparents, though troubling uncertainties remain.

Her descriptions of the years on the “war roads” and in the displaced persons camps are particularly heartbreaking. It becomes evident that her father, outwardly a successful professional, was permanently affected by an early childhood of deprivation and fear. But the revelations also bring understanding. The dead and the living mingle and reconnect.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In old Latvia, Inara Verzemnieks tells us, people believed that the dead returned home once a year to see how everyone was doing. The living couldn’t see them, but they felt their presence, maybe even talked to them. It was a source of great comfort.

NonfictionHistory

A pivotal moment in history

Review by Anne Bartlett

If Georg Neithardt had actually done his job in 1924, would the Nazis have come to power a decade later?

Neithardt was the dignified presiding judge who could have relegated Adolf Hitler to the dustbin of history when he and his fellow jurists convicted and sentenced Hitler in the treason trial that followed the Nazis' failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. Instead, Neithardt treated Hitler with the same patient leniency that one might accord a star quarterback caught jaywalking.

Far from stopping Hitler, the trial elevated his stature enormously. Author David King’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler is the first book-length account in English of how this happened, a powerful work that underlines what a pivot point the trial was—and how badly it went awry.

The international press dismissed the unsuccessful putsch of Nov. 8-9, 1923, as risible because it started in a beer hall. But the first exciting section of King’s account makes clear that it could very easily have led to civil war, if only Hitler hadn’t been too impetuous to wait for his allies in the Bavarian security forces to solidify their plans.

Neithardt wasn’t so much interested in helping Hitler as he was in protecting the senior Bavarian officials who had been trying to use Hitler’s followers in their own plot to overthrow the Weimar government in Berlin. The judges concealed the evidence of collusion and allowed Hitler to make bombastic, widely reported courtroom speeches, for fear that he might otherwise spill the beans. Then they sentenced him to a country-club prison, where he served less than six months.

Hitler was still an Austrian citizen then, and Neithardt was supposed to order him deported after his sentence. It never happened. The judge had a lot to answer for by the time he retired in 1937. Chancellor Hitler sent him a kind note, thanking him for his service.

If Georg Neithardt had actually done his job in 1924, would the Nazis have come to power a decade later?

NonfictionTrue CrimeHistory

An unsung hero

Review by Anne Bartlett

On the day of Joseph Petrosino’s funeral, the New York City mayor declared a public holiday. Everything shut down; a quarter-million people lined the streets to mourn his passing, as six black horses pulled his hearse in a procession from St. Patrick’s Cathedral to the cemetery.

Many readers are now asking themselves: Who on earth was Petrosino? Little remembered today, he was a hero more than 100 years ago—the first Italian police detective sergeant in the U.S. and the face of the national crusade against an extortion-and-kidnapping crime wave perpetrated mostly by Italian criminals against law-abiding fellow immigrants. Author Stephan Talty focuses on that crisis, at its height from 1903 to 1914, in his exciting narrative The Black Hand.

The Black Hand, a loosely affiliated collection of criminal gangs, terrorized Italian immigrants by extorting businesses, kidnapping children for ransom, blowing up buildings and killing the uncooperative. Most victims were too frightened to seek help, and the police and politicians were largely uninterested until the problem spread into nonimmigrant neighborhoods. But Petrosino, an incorruptible, opera-loving tough guy, fought back with his “Italian Squad” of cops, who developed modern investigative techniques.

During this era, Italian Americans had to overcome vile discrimination by native-born Americans. Talty’s writing is wonderfully evocative in capturing the complex immigrant experience of hope, fear, pride and bewilderment. He doesn’t stray into current events, but the parallels with contemporary political concerns are unmistakable. The first law allowing the deportation of immigrants who have criminal records in their home countries was passed in 1907, in direct response to the Black Hand. The organization was finally stamped out—but Petrosino lost his life in the struggle.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

On the day of Joseph Petrosino’s funeral, the New York City mayor declared a public holiday. Everything shut down; a quarter-million people lined the streets to mourn his passing, as six black horses pulled his hearse in a procession from St. Patrick’s Cathedral to the cemetery.

NonfictionBiography

The making of a massacre

Review by Anne Bartlett

Even now, after all the mass killings of recent decades—9/11, Oklahoma City, all the rest—the Jonestown massacre is still staggering in its horror. More than 900 Americans—nearly 300 of them children—died in a Guyanese jungle in 1978 after a dangerous crackpot named Jim Jones told them to commit suicide by swallowing a poison-infused drink.

How on earth could this have happened? Couldn’t someone have done something, anything, to prevent it? If there are answers to those questions, they start with examining Jones himself, the charismatic cult leader originally from small-town Indiana who drew thousands to his Peoples Temple, then destroyed those who followed him to his remote settlement. Writer Jeff Guinn, already a biographer of Charles Manson, provides a powerful account of Jones’ life based on a comprehensive examination of the records and new interviews with temple survivors and Jones’ relatives in The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple.

Jones is ultimately more interesting than Manson because he was a man of real accomplishment. Particularly in his early days, the white preacher fought effectively for civil rights for African Americans. Even as he drifted ever further into lunacy, his organization’s social service programs were always genuinely helpful. But simultaneously, Jones ran his ministry as a narcissistic cult, luring followers with phony faith healing and half-baked “socialist” rants, then exploiting his followers financially and sexually.

Was he always a monster or did something change? Initially, he resembled a number of other unorthodox evangelists. Then a pivot occurred in 1971 when Jones became addicted to drugs—his promiscuity and paranoia surged, and a tragic outcome became more likely, if not inevitable.

Guinn’s blow-by-blow account of Jonestown’s final days in the book’s last chapters is riveting. Jones betrayed hundreds of people who worshipped him; Guinn helps ensure we’ll remember their ruin.

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Even now, after all the mass killings of recent decades—9/11, Oklahoma City, all the rest—the Jonestown massacre is still staggering in its horror. More than 900 Americans—nearly 300 of them children—died in a Guyanese jungle in 1978 after a dangerous crackpot named Jim Jones told them to commit suicide by swallowing a poison-infused drink.

NonfictionTravelHistory

Lost in a tropical daze

Review by Anne Bartlett

Oh, the streets of Havana: the sound of live music heard through big open windows. Spanish spoken so fast, with so many dropped letters. The rotting grandeur. Irreverent jokes, nicknames, arguments. Constant talk, talk, talk—Spanish poet Federico García Lorca called the people of Havana the hablaneros, the talkers.

Havana is sui generis and addictive, and Mark Kurlansky really gets it, as much as any foreigner can. The prolific author has been visiting Cuba’s capital for more than 30 years as a journalist. Now, at a time when U.S.-Cuban relations appear to be in a thaw, he has captured its transcultural essence in Havana: A Subtropical Delirium.

As befits such a kaleidoscopic city, the book covers a little of everything: history, music, literature, food, interesting characters, personal reminiscences. One fun feature is a series of recipes of famous dishes (chicken with sour oranges) and drinks (use Havana Club light dry rum for your mojito).

Kurlansky emphasizes throughout that one strong element of Havana’s distinctive style is the African influence that began with the tragedy of slavery, which lasted until 1886. Havana’s rich and seminal music, dance and literature are an amalgam of Spanish and African traditions. And sadly, its recurrent violence and political instability are in part the legacy of slavery’s social distortions. 

Kurlansky is even-handed about the impact of the Castro government. Yes, he says, Cuba is a repressive police state, but Havana was a place of genuine experimentation in the early revolutionary years. Since the collapse of its Soviet support system, he writes, it has been reverting more to its norm.

Before 1960, that norm included omnipresent U.S. investors and tourists. Americans always adored Havana’s film-noir tone, which Kurlansky describes as “ornate but disheveled, somewhat like an unshaven man in a tattered tuxedo.” Will they return now? We’ll see. 

 

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Havana is sui generis and addictive, and Mark Kurlansky really gets it, as much as any foreigner can. The prolific author has been visiting Cuba’s capital for more than 30 years as a journalist. Now, at a time when U.S.-Cuban relations appear to be in a thaw, he has captured its transcultural essence in Havana: A Subtropical Delirium.

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