Next Year in Cuba by Gustavo Pérez-Firmat. It was nominated for a Pulitzer.

From Publishers Weekly "Poet and professor Firmat explores his identity as a Cuban American whose family was exiled from their native land in the wake of Castro's revolution. "

From Library Journal
"This is a touching, personal account of a young Cuban's departure from his native country and his assimilation of American culture and values, including marriage to an American, raising an American family, teaching at an American university, and, in general, accepting things American while longing for a greater knowledge of things Cuban and how his Cuban ancestry helped to define his American existence. Perez Firmat left Havana for Miami in 1960 at the age of 11, when the Castro regime seized his family's business and assets. He recounts his family's struggle to make ends meet, their desperate yearning to return to their homeland, and their despair at the failure of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Exile became immigration, and Perez Firmat shows that the impact was not only personal but cultural, for the passing of a generation can dilute a culture to the point of eventual extinction. Recommended for academic and public libraries, especially for students of Latin American and cultural studies." Philip Y. Blue, Dowling Coll. Lib., Oakdale, N.Y.

Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

"At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq'' civil war, a new law is unveiled that will allow Shell and BP to claim the country's vast oil reserves… Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly outsources the running of the 'War on Terror' to Halliburton and Blackwater… After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts… New Orleans residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be re-opened." Klein not only kicks butt, she names names, notably economist Milton Friedman and his radical Chicago School of the 1950s and 60s which she notes "produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today." Stand up and take a bow, Donald Rumsfeld.

There's little doubt Klein's book--which arrived to enormous attention and fanfare thanks to her previous missive, the best-selling No Logo, will stir the ire of the right and corporate America. It's also true that Klein's assertions are coherent, comprehensively researched and footnoted, and she makes a very credible case. Even if the world isn't going to hell in a hand-basket just yet, it's nice to know a sharp customer like Klein is bearing witness to the backroom machinations of government and industry in times of turmoil. --Kim Hughes

Love in the time of Cholera by Gabriel García-Márquez.

From Publishers Weekly
"In this chronicle of a unique love triangle, the Nobel laureate's trademark "ironic vision and luminous evocation of South America" persist. "It is a fully mature novel in scope and perspective, flawlessly translated, as rich in ideas as in humanity," praised PW . 250,000 first printing.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
"While delivering a message to her father, Florentino Ariza spots the barely pubescent Fermina Daza and immediately falls in love. What follows is the story of a passion that extends over 50 years, as Fermina is courted solely by letter, decisively rejects her suitor when he first speaks, and then joins the urbane Dr. Juvenal Urbino, much above her station, in a marriage initially loveless but ultimately remarkable in its strength. Florentino remains faithful in his fashion; paralleling the tale of the marriage is that of his numerous liaisons, all ultimately without the depth of love he again declares at Urbino's death. In substance and style not as fantastical, as mythologizing, as the previous works, this is a compelling exploration of the myths we make of love. Highly recommended." Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz.

From Publishers Weekly
SignatureReviewed by Matthew SharpeAreader might at first be surprised by how many chapters of a book entitled The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are devoted not to its sci fi–and–fantasy-gobbling nerd-hero but to his sister, his mother and his grandfather. However, Junot Diaz's dark and exuberant first novel makes a compelling case for the multiperspectival view of a life, wherein an individual cannot be known or understood in isolation from the history of his family and his nation.Oscar being a first-generation Dominican-American, the nation in question is really two nations. And Dominicans in this novel being explicitly of mixed Taíno, African and Spanish descent, the very ideas of nationhood and nationality are thoughtfully, subtly complicated. The various nationalities and generations are subtended by the recurring motif of fukú, the Curse and Doom of the New World, whose midwife and... victim was a historical personage Diaz will only call the Admiral, in deference to the belief that uttering his name brings bad luck (hint: he arrived in the New World in 1492 and his initials are CC). By the prologue's end, it's clear that this story of one poor guy's cursed life will also be the story of how 500 years of historical and familial bad luck shape the destiny of its fat, sad, smart, lovable and short-lived protagonist. The book's pervasive sense of doom is offset by a rich and playful prose that embodies its theme of multiple nations, cultures and languages, often shifting in a single sentence from English to Spanish, from Victorian formality to Negropolitan vernacular, from Homeric epithet to dirty bilingual insult. Even the presumed reader shape-shifts in the estimation of its in-your-face narrator, who addresses us variously as folks, you folks, conspiracy-minded-fools, Negro, Nigger and plataneros. So while Diaz assumes in his reader the same considerable degree of multicultural erudition he himself possesses—offering no gloss on his many un-italicized Spanish words and expressions (thus beautifully dramatizing how linguistic borders, like national ones, are porous), or on his plethora of genre and canonical literary allusions—he does helpfully footnote aspects of Dominican history, especially those concerning the bloody 30-year reign of President Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. The later Oscar chapters lack the linguistic brio of the others, and there are exposition-clogged passages that read like summaries of a longer narrative, but mostly this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel by Junot Diaz.Matthew Sharpe is the author of the novels Jamestown and The Sleeping Father. He teaches at Wesleyan University.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, and Fraud in the Writing of American History
by Peter Hoffer.

This is about the plagiarism cases of Steve Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin et al.

Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror by Michael Scheuer.

From 1996 to 1999, the no longer anonymous Michael Scheuer headed the CIA's Osama Bin Laden unit, and in his newest book on the subject, "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror," he attacks, often quite acerbically, many of the accepted orthodoxies about al-Qaeda and US foreign policy. He argues that Osama Bin Laden 'a hero to millions, if not tens of millions' is not bent on subjugating the non-Muslim world or scapegoating the West for political corruption and development failures in the Middle East. He is simply waging a defensive jihad against America because it supports Israel, Russia, India and other countries that fight Muslim militants.

"Were these cases of Germans behaving according to type as Germans? Or scientists in Germany behaving according to type as scientists?"

These chilling questions encompass two more specific points. First, did the scientists who developed poison gas weapons and concentration camps do it for scientific, personal, or political purposes? Second, can scientists claim to remain objective when funded by, and working for, military or government entities? Cornwell, whose last book was Hitler's Pope, takes a hard line against those scientists who stayed and helped the Nazis after Jewish scientists were expelled and Hitler's plans became clear. With the weight of evidence, Cornwell lays flat the various personal reasons the scientists gave for their actions during the war and shows that even before World War I, German scientists had shown themselves willing to subvert laws and morality in pursuit of money and power. Cornwell also clearly outlines the popular pseudosciences--"racial hygiene," astrology, glacial cosmogony--that drove Hitler's madness. Were there any German scientists who were swept up unknowing or unwilling in the Nazi war machine? It's unclear, but Cornwell's analysis of whether Werner Heisenberg was a "hero, a villain or a fellow traveler" is crucial to that question. Heisenberg's role in the Nazi's inability to complete an atomic bomb is still a riddle, but Cornwell presents all available facts and allows readers to draw their own conclusions. In his last chapters, Cornwell draws parallels between Hitler's scientists and those working in today's world of political anxiety, terrorism, and attacks on basic science. He demolishes once and for all the outdated, disproven, and dangerous notion of scientists working in a vacuum, free of the "taint" of the outside world, and answerable only to their funders. --Therese Littleton

Title: Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Investigation of American Anthropologists
Author: David Price

Comments: Threatening Anthropology offers a meticulously detailed account of how U.S. Cold War surveillance damaged the field of anthropology. David Price reveals how dozens of activist anthropologists were publicly and privately persecuted during the Red Scares of the 1940s and 1950s. He shows that it was not Communist Party membership or Marxist beliefs that attracted the most intense scrutiny from the FBI and congressional committees but rather social activism, particularly for racial justice. Price draws on extensive archival research -- including correspondence, oral histories, published sources, court hearings, and more than 30,000 pages of FBI and government memorandums released to him under the Freedom of Information Act. Today the "war on terror" is invoked to license the government's renewed monitoring of academic work, and it is increasingly difficult for researchers to access government documents, as Price's appendix describing his wrangling with Freedom of Information Act requests reveals. A disquieting chronicle of censorship and its consequences in the past, Threatening Anthropology is an impassioned cautionary tale for the present.
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Further information about TGIF can be obtained from kyle forinash

TGIF would like to thank Bill Rumsey for long and faithful service as organizer and coordinator for TGIF (1988-2001).