PositiveThe Washington Post\"... superb ... Thanks to Kornacki’s rich retelling of these events, we can see how today’s reshuffled political parties represent coalitions that began to form in reaction to the compromises their respective leaders forged in the 1990s ... If there’s a shortcoming in Kornacki’s book, it’s that he does not expressly address the connections between the changing international environment and the incipient decomposition, during the 1990s, of what had been a centrist two-party duopoly in American politics.\
Leonardo Padura, Trans. by Anna Kushner
RaveThe Washington Post...[a] gorgeous, sweeping novel ... Like the Rembrandt of his novel, who maneuvers among Amsterdam’s political and financial powers for the sake of his art, Padura seems to have set his sights on transcending his island nation’s political system, rather than defying it ... The uncertain fate of a priceless painting — made in Rembrandt’s studio, passed down through generations of Jews, then misplaced in Cuba as a consequence of the St. Louis incident — connects Padura’s multiple plotlines and supplies the book’s substantial, satisfying narrative tension. Yet the novel’s true subject is humankind’s need, in all times, in all places, to 'live in truth,' as the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel put it.
