Literary corner
We bring you some bad news: the English language edition of Ignacio Ramonet’s “biography” of Fidel Castro has made it to Australian bookshops. By the bucketload.
Obviously expecting brisk sales during the holiday season, all major booksellers in Sydney have stocked plenty of copies of "My Life", including the US-owned chain Borders.
At the Sydney flag store of the Australian group Dymocks, they have a huge pile of the 700-page volume under the sign “Inspirational Reading for Christmas”. Really.
Anyway ... not all is gloom and doom.
If you want to read the most accurate and devastating review of "My Life", you will need to turn to this knock-out piece published by The Daily Telegraph in London this week.
Under the headline “Soft-soaping Fidel Castro”, reviewer George Walden describes the book variously as “violently hagiographic”, “kooky” and “like treading molasses”. And Ramonet? Nothing but a “slimy toady”.
As for Castro himself, Mr Walden concludes: “If this man is the only inspiration of the destitute millions of South America, God help them.”
Obviously expecting brisk sales during the holiday season, all major booksellers in Sydney have stocked plenty of copies of "My Life", including the US-owned chain Borders.
At the Sydney flag store of the Australian group Dymocks, they have a huge pile of the 700-page volume under the sign “Inspirational Reading for Christmas”. Really.
Anyway ... not all is gloom and doom.
If you want to read the most accurate and devastating review of "My Life", you will need to turn to this knock-out piece published by The Daily Telegraph in London this week.
Under the headline “Soft-soaping Fidel Castro”, reviewer George Walden describes the book variously as “violently hagiographic”, “kooky” and “like treading molasses”. And Ramonet? Nothing but a “slimy toady”.
As for Castro himself, Mr Walden concludes: “If this man is the only inspiration of the destitute millions of South America, God help them.”
posted by Luis M Garcia at 11:36 am
2 Comments:
I guess is call "My Life", because "My Camp" was taken. I don't wish castro to die, I wish he could live with the rationing card and the salary of the average foot cuban, for another 50 years.
Just imagine a comparable hagiography about some right wing dictator. First of all, it would never have been published by any major or "respectable" publisher, and even if it had seen print, the outraged outcry from the world's "intellectuals" would be deafening.
Can you imagine the columns in practically every newspaper denouncing the travesty? But this vile piece of abject kissing-up to a monstrous tyrant is OK, just like the UN sending the thoroughly compromised Jean Ziegler to "report" on Cuba is OK. It's more than OK, it's routine.
Cuba may have the dubious distinction of being the most frequently and flagrantly betrayed country on the planet. Nearly half a century of it and counting, and the list of amoral (or worse) backstabbers is practically endless--and still growing.
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