Olga

Rating:
Summary: Hate to rain on Morais' parade, but...
Review: The problem is that, as a Marxist, I prefer biographs of communists to be _political_ not sentimental. As it is, Olga Benario's biography is moving enough; but it has to be understood in terms of the age's ideological and political choices. Olga, after all, was not only a helpless victim of Vargas and Nazism; she was also the model Stalinist professional revolutionary, a bureaucrat with a taste for autoritharian choices and adventures, who became embroiled into an unfortunate attempt at revolution-making by means of a Latin American style military putsch doomed from the start, something the book never even tries to explain. Were a Isaac Deutscher to write the book, he would begin by explaining Comintern politics at the time, the need felt by Stalin to compensate for the crushing failure of his politics in Germany by means of some adventure elsewhere, the fantasies harboured among his henchmen about the situation in Brazil, the personality cult fostered around Prestes...Well, absolutely nothing of that is explained in the book, which will now become a film in Brazil directed by a telenovela director from TV Globo. Good entretainment with no intellectual analysis whatsoever -that's how I would summarize this book.

Rating:
Summary: Olga is an Inspiration
Review: This is one of my four all time favorite books. It's set in a fascinating time period (the years leading up to WWII) and tells the story of an incredibly couragous woman, Olga Benario. The writing is straight forward with few flourishes but the book includes so many fascinating details of this woman's life that you can't help feeling inspired by her strenght of her character. I suppose I could say something about how great it is to find a book like this when women are so often left out of history books, but it certainly wasn't written as an attempt at political correctness. Olga's story simply had to be told because she was just such an amazing person.