RaveNew York Times Book ReviewThe book is beautifully translated. Cleary advisedly leaves in Spanish terms ... The biggest success of Witches is the way she weaves together two distinct voices ... Though the book chronicles violence against women and those who present as women, it highlights, in both rural and urban communities, an atmosphere of freedom and mobility that is a pleasure to read about.
Graciela Mochkofsky
PositiveThe New York ReviewMochkofsky condenses an astonishing sweep of religious and political history from the Spanish conquest to Zionism, connecting it to Segundo’s story with a light touch ... Mochkofsky pointedly avoids telling the reader how to interpret this story. Were the Peruanim exploited by enthusiastic proponents of settlements in Palestine, or did they exploit right-wing nationalism to get what they wanted? Or was it a bit of both?
Mario Vargas Llosa trans. by Adrian Nathan West
MixedLondon Review of Books (UK)The sections of Vargas Llosa’s novel that deal with well-known historical figures—Árbenz, Bernays, Castillo Armas—lie rather flat on the page ... The novel lingers longer on the aftermath than on the coup itself. Caca was not in power long—he was assassinated in 1957 by a leftist sympathiser in his presidential guard. The soldier supposedly acted alone, but whether he was part of a larger conspiracy remains unknown. The novel’s version of the assassination follows a not terribly well-sourced theory ... In a book stuffed with limp historical actors and long Wikipedia-like passages, [\'Miss Guatemala\'] is the only character who achieves lift-off.
Adam Goodman
PositiveHarper\'sHistories take a long time to write, and much of Goodman’s extensive and exuberantly footnoted study predates the election of Donald Trump. It must have been strange to spend years researching deportation history in archives across the United States and Mexico—writing an academic book often feels like a private obsession—only to see it all burst into the open in 2015, when Trump began raving about Mexican rapists and promising to deport the millions of people living in this country without papers. What had previously been a question for historians like Goodman—and for the undocumented and their families, who are so rarely listened to—became a matter of public urgency. Are we, or were we ever, a \'nation of immigrants\'?
Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna
MixedHarper\'sLa Serna and Starn tell the history of Shining Path from various perspectives of people belonging to a range of social classes. The technique, minus some literary high jinks, is reminiscent of Conversation in the Cathedral, the best novel of one of the blundering villains of their story—Mario Vargas Llosa. The dominant threads are histories of Guzmán, La Torre, and Iparraguirre, with an emphasis—overemphasis, really—on their love stories ... the book is notable for the relative absence of North Americans who are too often the unnecessary narrator-guides to books about Latin America ... Starn and La Serna do not give a convincing sense of why people were drawn to join the Shining Path. The authors briefly mention Moyano’s interest in liberation theology, the left-wing variant of Catholicism with a \'preferential option for the poor.\' But they do not draw out this connection, nor do they analyze another religious development that pulled in the opposite political direction ... I finished more than three hundred and fifty pages and still wondered why people took up dynamite to join a group that demanded blood sacrifice from followers.
