rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (02/05/86)
<Dozo meshiagate, kudasai!> Here's a review of the reading lists on Central American conflicts offered by Tim Myers and Andy Berman. It concentrates almost com- pletely on Nicaragua. ******************************* * REVIEWING THE READING LISTS * ******************************* TIM MYERS' READING LIST Reviewing the Reviews ===================== Here are more reviews of Shirley Christian's book NICARAGUA: REVOLUTION IN THE FAMILY (as found in BOOK REVIEW INDEX, May/Aug & Sep/Oct 85): Book List v81 6/28/85 p 1508 Book World v15 7/14/85 p 4 Business Week 8/19/85 p 12 Christian Science Monitor v77 9/30/85 p 23 Commentary v80 7/85 p 23 Kirkus Reviews v53 5/15/85 p 456 LA Times Book Review 8/18/85 p 1 NY Magazine 6/10/85 p 32 NY Times v134 7/20/85 p 11 NY Times Book Review v90 7/28/85 p 1 Publishers Weekly v227 6/7/85 p 71 Wall Street Journal v206 8/1/85 p 15 Washington Monthly 7+8/85 I've read the reviews in NY Magazine (by Michael Kramer, a contributing editor), NYTimes Book Review (by Timothy Garton Ash, author of "The Polish Revolution: Solidarity", editorial writer for the Times of London, & foreign editor of The Spectator--the later a conservative British journal of opinion; but Ash doesn't seem to be very conservative at all: see his pieces on Hungary in recent NYRs), & the Washington Monthly (Charles Lane, who published a report from Managua, "The People's Happiness", in the 5/20/85 New Republic): they're all favorable to Christian's book. Kramer: "NICARAGUA is easy sledding, non-hysterical, well researched, and honest. Christian forces us to remember both the history of Nicaragua and America's involvement there, and to recall how the anti-Somoza revolution came about. She reminds us, too, about the Sandinistas' roots and offers a compelling (and grim) look at life inside Nicaragua today....Christian is convincing on a key point: Ronald Reagan didn't push the commandantes into the Soviet-Cuban orbit. They went there happily and from the begin- ning because it is where they always intended to go....Read NICARAGUA. It is time well spent." Ash: "....this is very much a reporter's book. At the beginning, we are parachuted straight into a forest of facts....She is quite right to correct the Sandinistas' falsification of history, by pointing out that, `as autho- ritarian regimes go,' the Somoza regime `ceded to its political enemies and critics a relatively large amount of space to act in public life' and that this non-Sandinista opposition played quite as large a part as the....FSLN in the overthrow of Somoza in 1979....And in her narrative she provides a wealth of detail to demonstrate, it seems to me beyond a reasonable doubt, that the Sandinistas set out from the start to gain for themselves as much power as possible, permanently, and were prepared from the start to use lies, lawlessness and violence against their political opponents when these seemed necessary." Ash notes, however, that "it becomes clear quite early on that her trust and sympathies lie with the elite of articulate, educated `bourgeois' Nicaraguans" so that "there is a question whether her sympathies do not lead her to overestimate their political will, strength and virtue." "How democratic a system would they have installed?", he asks. Though he thinks her political critique of the Sandinistas sound, he finds she rather arrogantly dismisses the economic achievements they claim (land redistribution, health, housing, literacy): "A fuller and fairer account of such social and economic improvements as the revolution has (apparently) brought would not damage her political argument. After all, even the most obviously repressive and unjust Soviet-style revolutions, such as those in Cuba or Poland, brought some socioeconomic benefits to the peasantry, at least in the early stages." He faults her "rather sweeping characterization of the Sandinistas as `Leninist'" not only because differences between the commandantes are visible, but because, despite their trappings of "Leninist terminology and tactics", "the key to the Sandinistas' behavior is rather to be found, as Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has suggested in an article in the New York Times Magazine ["In Nicaragua," 4/28/85, pp 36-42] in `an old Latin American tradition' -- namely, that `they believe, although they don't admit it, that real legitimacy resides in the weapons that enable you to take power, and that once you have power there is no reason to share it.' An old Latin American tradition, Mr. Vargas Llosa adds, `THAT THEY SHARE WITH A GOOD NUMBER OF THEIR ADVERSARIES' (my [ie, Ash's] emphasis)." A tradition that they share, in fact, with Mao and Chiang in China, or even Castro and Battista in Cuba; this is my observation, at any rate, not Ash's. By the way, Llosa's latest novel, THE REAL LIFE OF ALEJANDRO MAYTA (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1986, $16.95), reviewed in the 1/12/86 Boston Sunday Globe, pp B17-18, traces the career of a gay Latin revolutionary in the mountain of Peru. Christian claims internal repression created the contras, but Ash again invokes the above "tradition" to show there's an additional reason: when you consider the armed opposition, whether contras or anti-contra Eden Pastora, "you find yourself transported back into the world of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a world in which armed rebellion is the natural response to an affront to one's honor. She [Christian] herself comments: `It was difficult to tell whether Pastora was more upset over the totalitarian drift of the regime or over his being excluded from power'". Finally, Ash notes that, since most of her reporting (which is much of the book) was done in the early 80s, it doesn't really cover the impact of the contras, and that she offers no solutions. Thus the book, more for its "description" than its "analysis", is a "reportorial gold mine." [ Continued ] Better well-read than Red, Cheers, Ron Rizzo