Calling All Heroes
A Manual for Taking Power
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The euphoric idealism of grassroots reform and the tragic reality of revolutionary failure are at the center of this speculative novel that opens with a real historical event. On October 2, 1968, 10 days before the Summer Olympics in Mexico, the Mexican government responds to a student demonstration in Tlatelolco by firing into the crowd, killing more than 200 students and civilians and wounding hundreds more. The Tlatelolco massacre was erased from the official record as easily as authorities washing the blood from the streets, and no one was ever held accountable.
It is two years later and Nestor, a journalist and participant in the fateful events, lies recovering in the hospital from a knife wound. His fevered imagination leads him in the collection of facts and memories of the movement and its assassination in the company of figures from his childhood. Nestor calls on the heroes of his youth—Sherlock Holmes, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, and D’Artagnan among them—to join him in launching a new reform movement conceived by his intensely active imagination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1970, recovering from a knife wound, Nestor, a journalist and partisan of the Mexican Movement of 1968, enlists his friends to help him recall the details of the protests, which culminated in the massacre of 49 students by army troops. Later, feverish from a kidney infection, Nestor calls on the heroes of his youth--Sherlock Holmes, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp and D'Artagnan among them--to join him in launching a new reform movement conceived by his intensely active imagination. Taibo ( An Easy Thing ) skillfully interweaves facts and reverie in a profoundly stirring portrayal of the euphoric idealism of grassroots reform and the tragic reality of revolutionary failure. This brief, unconventional work has little narrative continuity (the story of the Movement of '68 is told by way of interviews, letters, newspaper clippings and poems) and the reader may become confused by the haphazard, impressionistic prose. Yet Taibo's writing is witty, provocative, finely nuanced and well worth the challenge.
