PositiveThe Financial TimesThe result of [DePalma\'s] clear-eyed affection for this midsized communist island is a deeply reported if somewhat rambling account of Cuba’s bittersweet realities. He has a deep feeling for the place and I suspect the project was hatched before Donald Trump dashed hopes of US détente and, with that, the waves of American tourists who might have visited and found through DePalma’s book a deeper understanding of the Cubans buzzing around them ... DePalma leaves it to the reader to draw their own political conclusions.
Andrew D Selee
PositiveThe Financial TimesMr Selee’s enthusiasm for the ground-level views of the characters who are quietly building Mexican-US ties can make him seem a softie. But he is painstakingly even-handed.
Francisco Cantú
RaveThe Financial Times\"The narrative plays out in such vignettes: tender, lyrical, and with a singular poise that is unsentimental and restrained, in prose as clear as desert air … Every statistic about human beings, Cantú tells himself, is a big number ‘times one.’ It becomes Cantú’s mantra as he rebuilds the humanity that he feels ground down in himself and his former colleagues by the bureaucratic toil and ‘moral injury’ of their work. It also finds expression in the story of José, Cantú’s times one and the subject of the moving last third of the book.\
Alex Cuadros
PositiveThe Financial Times...a clear-eyed and often funny travelogue through the operatic lives of the country’s ultra-wealthy and their baneful relationship with the state ... Cuadros’s blend of memoir, exposé and historical narrative provides a wonderful vehicle to explain how this state of affairs was reached.
