An excellent book by Jon Lee Anderson profiles reveals the unseen side of people like Federico García Lorca, Gabriel García Márquez, Hugo Chávez, Augusto Pinochet, and King Juan Carlos.
say that after the death of Ryszard Kapuscinski the only reporter of that caliber that's left is Jon Lee Anderson. The U.S. plays the last kind of journalists to anyone, "says Juan Villoro beyond-the art" giving bad news well. "
Anderson began his craft in Peru in 1979, in the weekly The Lima Times . Since then he has cultivated a reputation as a writer and chronic profiles. In essence, this is a fearless professional who, however, do not do unnecessary risks grace. His book The Fall of Baghdad was conceived in the fire of shrapnel. His closest friends say that when hunting dangerous places has the usual wise to reserve rooms in different hotels. Anderson fears that one of them might one day be bombed or serve as a hideout of a potential murderer.
Sportswriters tend to travel a lot, while half of his life goes on airplanes or in unlikely places. This author knows inside out half the world's geography as well as public and private life of controversial characters, many of them inaccessible to the vast majority of men of the press. Their lives have often served as a starting point of his most famous books. So it was with Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life , whose more than seven hundred pages ammunition and unbiased portrait the life azaroza former partner and fellow Fidel Castro, another of the recurrent targets of his investigative reporting.
In dictator, demons and other chronic (Anagram, 2009), a book that recently circulated in Peru, Lee Anderson includes twelve of the best stories and profiles originally published in the weekly magazine The New Yorker . Under his lens Inquisitor parade portraits of Federico García Lorca, the king of Spain, Augusto Pinochet, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and Cuban stories about poverty, corruption of American politics and life in the turbulent favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
The technique and procedures for writing profiles and reviews demand, says John Villoro, two basic resources: the interview and the composition of the place. I would add one more: a taste for minutiae, for the seemingly inconsequential data, and thanks to them we can form a more comprehensive and humane about the protagonists of the events. In the case of the author of The dictator, demons and other chronic has the cunning and persuasive gifts to reach the most unlikely sources, has the eye of the observer who does not miss any detail and shows a natural bias to discover objects, situations, actions and circumstances under "Minutiae, poquedades, irrelevant facts, which, if you look closely, they say much more than the rated as important.
Anderson's book is read with pleasure by all the above reasons, by the refined language that has been written and the rigor of research that establishes its relationship to historical truth. Thanks to these virtues, readers inform us, without ever taking off from her book, the last moments of Lorca, Pinochet's admiration for Mao, the diplomatic skills of King Juan Carlos, the cabal skills García Márquez , the messianic cult of Simón Bolívar Hugo Chavez and Fidel power mania Castro.
thing that strikes me about her work is the way it approaches the characters. To get at these uses of close friends, conversations off the record of rumor and simple intuition. It is, for example, a friend of Saddam Hussein's favorite doctor, Ala Bashir, in order to portray from within the fall of Baghdad, or linked to Hugo Chavez to family reunions and encounters with poor people to learn how site think and act this leftist temperamental. In all cases, the means justify the end: informar.Creo without profiles and chronicles of this great journalist would approach very limited part of the characters and major events of this time. Also founded criticism and entertaining narrative of his texts make us complicit in a present that does not hesitate to accept because of the convincing force of his speech.
say that after the death of Ryszard Kapuscinski the only reporter of that caliber that's left is Jon Lee Anderson. The U.S. plays the last kind of journalists to anyone, "says Juan Villoro beyond-the art" giving bad news well. "
Anderson began his craft in Peru in 1979, in the weekly The Lima Times . Since then he has cultivated a reputation as a writer and chronic profiles. In essence, this is a fearless professional who, however, do not do unnecessary risks grace. His book The Fall of Baghdad was conceived in the fire of shrapnel. His closest friends say that when hunting dangerous places has the usual wise to reserve rooms in different hotels. Anderson fears that one of them might one day be bombed or serve as a hideout of a potential murderer.
Sportswriters tend to travel a lot, while half of his life goes on airplanes or in unlikely places. This author knows inside out half the world's geography as well as public and private life of controversial characters, many of them inaccessible to the vast majority of men of the press. Their lives have often served as a starting point of his most famous books. So it was with Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life , whose more than seven hundred pages ammunition and unbiased portrait the life azaroza former partner and fellow Fidel Castro, another of the recurrent targets of his investigative reporting.
In dictator, demons and other chronic (Anagram, 2009), a book that recently circulated in Peru, Lee Anderson includes twelve of the best stories and profiles originally published in the weekly magazine The New Yorker . Under his lens Inquisitor parade portraits of Federico García Lorca, the king of Spain, Augusto Pinochet, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and Cuban stories about poverty, corruption of American politics and life in the turbulent favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
The technique and procedures for writing profiles and reviews demand, says John Villoro, two basic resources: the interview and the composition of the place. I would add one more: a taste for minutiae, for the seemingly inconsequential data, and thanks to them we can form a more comprehensive and humane about the protagonists of the events. In the case of the author of The dictator, demons and other chronic has the cunning and persuasive gifts to reach the most unlikely sources, has the eye of the observer who does not miss any detail and shows a natural bias to discover objects, situations, actions and circumstances under "Minutiae, poquedades, irrelevant facts, which, if you look closely, they say much more than the rated as important.
Anderson's book is read with pleasure by all the above reasons, by the refined language that has been written and the rigor of research that establishes its relationship to historical truth. Thanks to these virtues, readers inform us, without ever taking off from her book, the last moments of Lorca, Pinochet's admiration for Mao, the diplomatic skills of King Juan Carlos, the cabal skills García Márquez , the messianic cult of Simón Bolívar Hugo Chavez and Fidel power mania Castro.
thing that strikes me about her work is the way it approaches the characters. To get at these uses of close friends, conversations off the record of rumor and simple intuition. It is, for example, a friend of Saddam Hussein's favorite doctor, Ala Bashir, in order to portray from within the fall of Baghdad, or linked to Hugo Chavez to family reunions and encounters with poor people to learn how site think and act this leftist temperamental. In all cases, the means justify the end: informar.Creo without profiles and chronicles of this great journalist would approach very limited part of the characters and major events of this time. Also founded criticism and entertaining narrative of his texts make us complicit in a present that does not hesitate to accept because of the convincing force of his speech.