Octavio Paz

        Octavio Paz was a Mexican poet who was born in 1914 in Mexico City. He is very accredited, having won the Miguel de Cervantes award in 1981, the American Neustadt Prize in 1982, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990. He helped to found the Mexican, anti-fascist newspaper, The Taller(Workshop). He was an extremely strong believer in anti-fascism. Later, he helped to found two magazines: Plural and Vuelta.
        He did work in Mexico, India, France, Spain, and the U.S.A. This can be seen in his works, as these countries inspired many of his poems and essays. He participated in the second international congress for anti-fascism while in Spain. He was sent to France as a Mexican Diplomat. He was later sent to India as the Mexican Ambassador. He later resigned from diplomatic service due to the fascist treatment of student demonstrations during the Olympic games in Mexico.

In Cuba I was a German Shepherd

Disclaimer: This review is about the short story, not the book as a whole

        Ana Menendez's short story, In Cuba I was a German Shepherd views a meetup between four men in the park of Little Havana in Miami. They are all older men, two of whom lived in Cuba during the revolution. They discuss many reasons why they do not feel quite right in their current home of Miami. Little Havana is an accurate mimic of a neighborhood in Cuba. They feel mostly at home, but there are always the tour buses that come and speak of Cuban culture and how many of these people are Cuban exiles. There is a rather comedic scene where one of the characters runs after the tour bus yelling curses. The title of this story is significant because when they refer to feeling out of place in America, one of the characters tells a story about a dog who comes to Cuba from America and is misunderstood. Overall, this was a great story. The profanity could have been a bit less, but it was not completely overwhelming. It was fun to follow the lives of these men who do not feel that they are correctly understood in America.

Ana Menendez

        Ana Menendez was born in 1970 in Los Angeles to Cuban exiles. Her parents planned to move back to Cuba at any time, so they prepared Ana for this. She spoke only Spanish until she was enrolled in kindergarten. They didn't ever move back to Cuba, but they did move to Florida, where Ana earned her Bachelor of Arts from Florida International University. She got her Master of Fine Arts at New York University. Ana was a journalist from 1991 until 1997. She then accepted a Fulbright Grant to teach at the American University in Cairo. Ana entered the Creative Writing program at New York University in 1997, where she was a New York Times Fellow. She now lives in Maastricht and Miami. In an interview with Coastline Magazine, she said:

"The difference between writing fiction and writing journalism is a little like the difference between working with oils and working with fast-drying acrylics. With fiction, you have a long time before the work 'sets'; you can re-contour, re-blend, touch-up, even wipe clean and start again. With journalism, you have about eight hours to get the picture done and then another four or five of obsessing, 'did I spell that name right, did I screw up that date, is the fact correct?' With journalism, there's no going back. There are no 'revisions' only 'corrections'. It's very unforgiving. There's something to love and loathe in both 'media'."

        Ana has written four books. Her first book, In Cuba I was a German Shepherd, was awarded a Pushcart Prize and was nominated for a New York Times notable book. This was a book of short stories. It was published in 2001. Her first novel, Loving Che, was published in 2003. In June of 2009, she published another novel, The Last War. Her most recent book, Adios, Happy Homeland!, was published in 2011 and is a book of linked, formally experimental short stories.
        As a journalist, Ana Menendez has done plenty of work in Cuba, Haiti, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and India. She has written for the Miami Herald, where she covered the small neighborhood of Little Havana. The Last War is about the war in Iraq and is set in Istanbul. This displays her as a rather adventurous author, as Istanbul is one thousand miles from Baghdad. This was a bold choice that could easily have destroyed the book, but she was able to precariously pull it off. Ana Menendez is a fantastic author, who's legacy is not easily overstated.

The Mirabal Sisters

        The Mirabal sisters were four sisters who opposed the Trujillo regime. For more information on the regime, see my other post, The Dominican Republic during the Trujillo Regime. Three of the four sisters openly and sometimes violently opposed the regime.

Patria Mirabal

Patria Mercedes Mirabal Reyes (Patria)

        The oldest of the sisters, Patria was usually the role model. Though she was not the leader of the rebel uprising, she played an active part in it. She went to the Inmaculada Concepcion,  a convent and boarding school, when she was 14. She married Pedro Gonzalez when she was 17. Pedro also actively supported the rebels. There are records of her saying "We cannot allow our children to grow up in this corrupt and tyrannical regime. We have to fight against it, and I am willing to give up everything, even my life if necessary." She was one of the three sisters who was murdered by Trujillo's henchmen on  November 25, 1960.

Dede Mirabal

Bélgica Adela Mirabal Reyes (Dede)

        Born one year later, Dede did not actively participate in the rebellion. She likely would have participated, but her husband, Jaimito, wouldn't let her. It does not end there, though, as Jaimito disapproved of  what the other three sisters were doing so much that he called the police on them. She filed for divorce in 1984.  As she was the only sister who survived the conflict, she devoted the rest of her life to continuing the legacy of her other three sisters. Jaimito's calling the police resulted in the other three sisters and their husbands being sent to prison, but they had to be let out when spectators appeared. The husbands were transferred to a prison in the mountains, where the sisters were murdered and run off a cliff. Unlike her sisters, Dede did not go to college. She stayed home and helped with the family business, as she was a prodigy at math.

Minerva Mirabal

María Argentina Minerva Mirabal Reyes (Minerva)

        Since Minerva was the third sister born within a year of the other two, her father was beginning to realize that he wasn't going to get a boy. Minerva was arguably the leader of their movement, as she had learned of the horrors of the regime at a fairly early age. She was exposed to this at the Inmaculada Concepcion by a friend who had her brother, along with the rest of the men in her family, murdered by the regime. She also had another friend who became one of the many girlfriends of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the current leader of the regime. She is quoted as saying "It is a source of happiness to do whatever can be done for our country that suffers so many anguishes. It is sad to stay with one's arms crossed."

Maria Teresa Mirabal

Antonia Maria Teresa Mirabal Reyes (Maria Teresa)

         Born five years after Minerva, Maria Teresa was the fourth and final sister. She did not learn of the rebellion until it was on the brink of violence, but joined and openly participated anyway. She married Leandro Guzman, who also participated in the conflict. She studied math at the University of Santo Domingo. She was crucial to the conflict with her knowledge of mathematics and all around devotedness. She is quoted as saying "… perhaps what we have most near is death, but that idea does not frighten me, we shall continue to fight for that which is just…"

The Dominican Republic during the Trujillo Regime

       

The Dominican Republic

        The Dominican Republic was a dictatorship between 1930 and 1961 led by a man named Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. It was a terrible time socially, but, honestly, it greatly advanced the economy of the country. The laws of the Trujillo regime went as far as people being required to hang a picture of Trujillo in a glorified section of the house, and to come and stay at parties that Trujillo is present at.
        Rebel groups were common. The members of these groups were incredibly brave, as anyone who showed dislike for the government was immediately killed. These murders were staged as accidents to keep citizens of the Dominican Republic in the dark. Not many people actually understood what Trujillo was currently doing, and saw him as the great "Benefactor".

Raphael Leonidas Trujillo

        Trujillo made laws that required you to come to his parties, and stay at them until they were over. He had a nasty habit of drugging women and then raping them. He was technically married, but had several girlfriends placed around the country. Many of these women were attacked by Trujillo's official wife. He had potions made for him that were supposed to keep him sexually potent.
        Trujillo was able to destroy rebel groups with little disruption to the law-abiding population by hiring plenty of undercover spies. When someone was discovered to be part of the Rebel group, they would either be murdered - or tortured until they talked, then murdered.
        Trujillo sponsored propaganda against the Haitians on the other side of the island, even though he himself was one-quarter Haitian. In the Parsley Massacre, between October 2 and 8 of 1937, the Dominican military was said to have killed between 17,000 and 30,000 Haitians living on the Dominican side of the border. This is called the Parsley Massacre because the army distinguished Haitians from Afro-Dominicans using their pronunciation of the word perejil, or parsley. To cover up military intervention, the army was instructed to use machetes rather than guns.

The Dominican National Palace in Santa Domingo

        After Trujillo's agents attempted to assassinate Rómulo Betancourt, the Venezuelan President and critic of the regime, the United States government decided to intervene. There is no evidence to prove it, but many people believe that the American Army was involved with his assassination on May 30, 1961.
        What complicates the matter is that it must be acknowledged that Trujillo improved the country astronomically in some ways. He greatly increased the wealth of the country, making the country free of debt by 1947, even though most of the wealth was distributed to his closest followers and himself. He did greatly advance healthcare, education, and infrastructure. Many new hospitals and clinics appeared during his regime, as well as schools. He built up a whole new web of roads and harbors. He created a housing construction program, and launched a pension plan. He ended a 50 year customs agreement 15 years early and negotiated a border with Haiti.
        Though Trujillo did an incredible amount of terrible things over the course of his regime, he also greatly advance the Dominican republic financially and structurally.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

        The Hunger Games was an okay book. Not bad, but not a classic, either. It had a lot of gruesome scenes of violence that I guess were supposed to alert you of the appalling horrors of Panem, but I just thought it was overdone. It is a pretty effective tragedy that is fairly likely to make you tear up a little bit if you are the kind of person who does that.
        The story begins in the coldly named "district 12" in what is left of America, which is known as "Panem". Katniss Everdeen has to resort to illegally poaching to keep her family from starving to death. Every year, a boy and a girl from each district (there are twelve) is taken and put into a cold fight to the death in an artificial biosphere against the other 23 children.
        Overall, this was a pretty good book. I would say that this is definitely not for the faint of heart, as it does have some surprisingly sad portions within the gruesome, yet strangely interesting games.

Current Readings: In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez

Disclaimer: This is not a review. This is my current thinking on a book that I have not yet finished.

        In the Time of the Butterflies is an incredible adaptation of the story of the Mirabal sisters, four girls who fought to end the harsh Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic. It is an epic tale of real life freedom fighters.

Julia Alvarez is a commercially successful author who has written highly acclaimed books such as How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies
Julia Alvarez was born in New York City on March 27, 1950. She moved to the Dominican Republic when she was 3 months old, but moved back to the United States when she was 10 after the rebel underground her father was in was discovered. She technically knew English when she went to America, but, as I quote from her official website, “classroom English, heavily laced with Spanish, did not prepare me for the "barbaric yawp" of American English -- as Whitman calls it.” Her classmates were not very welcoming of her, since she was one of the only Latin Americans in the school. (JuliaAlvarez.com) They would call her “Spic!” when they were at the playground. (JuliaAlvarez.com)
        Julia got her bachelor’s degree in the arts at The Middlebury College, and got her
Master’s degree in creative writing at Syracuse University. Before she was a writer, she was a teacher for many years. It was a full twenty years of writing before she actually got a book contract for her first published novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents. (JuliaAlvarez.com)
        Now Julia is the writer in residence at The Middlebury College in Vermont. She has been married to Bill Eichner for 27 years (as of 2016).
       
        In the end, her work most certainly paid off. She now has several bestsellers, such as
How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, and In the Time of the Butterflies. How the
Garcia Girls Lost their Accents is about a some girls who are in a situation much like
twelve year old Julia Alvarez, meaning they were sent to America while they were
accustomed to their homeland. In the Time of the Butterflies is about the Mirabal sisters
and their incredible efforts to free the Dominican Republic.

Works Cited
            Editors, Biography.com. "Julia Alvarez Biography." The Biography.com Website. A&E Television Networks, 2 Apr. 2014. Web. 22 Sept. 2016.
            Potts, Sienna M. "About Me." Julia Alvarez. Julia Alvarez, 21 July 2016. Web. 22 Sept. 2016.
Julia Alvarez put a lot of time and effort into writing before she even succeeded.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, By Douglas Adams

        The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a truly remarkable work of art that, to this day, is still unprecedented. Its magnificent combination of seriousness and silliness (but mostly silliness!) is incredible. This science fiction classic is definitely a must read for those who haven't read it already. Even if you don't think you like science fiction, pick up a copy, and get carried away.
        The story starts with Arthur Dent, a seemingly normal man living in a seemingly normal portion of England. One peculiar thing was that the council wants to tear down Arthur's house to make way for a bypass. This did not sit well with Arthur. He proceeded to lie in front of the bulldozer in front of his house. Another peculiar thing, known to almost no one on Earth, was that the world was about to be destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Lucky for Arthur, he has a friend, Ford Prefect, who was secretly an Alien all along. Ford is able to safely get them off of Earth moments before it is destroyed. You then follow Arthur and Ford on a series of crazy and seemingly impossible adventures through the galaxy.
        Overall, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a fantastic book with many random and exciting tangents to enrich the underlying plot. It is a truly unbelievable set of adventures that obviously sets a precedent for future works of science fiction.

Hello!

Hello!

Welcome to The Little Blog of Books! On this blog, I will discuss books that I have recently read and movies I have recently watched. I do this because sometimes I feel like a lot of the movies and books that become popular are completely overrated. Or maybe there are small books that I think are not as popular as they should be. I want to take these books or movies and give them the reviews that they deserve.

So Long (for now)