THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Loving Che by Ana Menendez (Grove/Atlantic, 227 pp., $22). No question about it: Ernesto Che Guevara is the sexiest revolutionary of modern times. Executed...
...If readers' memories extend to a little more of Guevara—^his call from the Bolivian backcountry, for instance, demanding "Two, three, many Vietnams"—they may be less inclined to recollect Che as lovingly as does Ana Menendez...
...Executed October 8, 1967, by a drunken Bolivian army sergeant after he was captured while undertaking a singularly ill-organized attempt to carry revolution from the island of Cuba to the Latin American mainland, Che continues to adorn T-shirts, posters, and banners around the world...
...He closes his eyes and draws me close, a great catch in his throat like a day’s dying into night...
...For the sake of healthy children, it must be the parents...
...Perhaps most startling is the way feminist academics censor research on the detrimental effects of day care...
...In case Menéndez felt her words alone would not suffice to convey to readers the special magical potency of the man, photographs of Guevara are scattered throughout the text, most culled from the Cuban magazine Bohemia, showing the Argentine adventurer in the initial years of Castro’s reign...
...The daughter of Miami Cubans, Menendez is a perfectly competent writer, not without talent in describing the Havana of today, but her holy icon turns to mush...
...Arguing against subsidizing commercial day care, he claims that "most families would prefer to balance work and home in a way that would allow them to be more engaged with the raising of their children, not less...
...Erin Montgomery...
...His lips full and moist where palm trees grew and peasant women came to be filled" The purported theme of Loving Che is a woman’s quest for her mother, left behind in Cuba when she was an infant, and the discovery of letters and photographs that lead her to believe the sainted Che must have been her daddy...
...And yes, he does indeed look a dashing devil...
...By the mid-1990s, conservatives were suffering from what Robertson calls "political schizophrenia" on child-care issues...
...In his carefully researched Day Care Deception, Robertson explores what happens when childrearing is placed in the hands of the government...
...She becomes the groupie incarnate: “the slip of his tongue like an island of madmen...
...In Day Care Deception, Robertson asks whether we should fund day-care centers or make it easier for parents to be parents...
...Any number of novels over the years, all pretty mediocre, have featured him as a noble, deeply romantic figure, but no author surely has mooned so girlishly over him in print as has Ana Menendez...
...Guevara has often been a hero in movies (once portrayed by Omar Sharif, of all people), most recently in a film adaptation of his youthful diary about a motorcycle trip around South America...
...Cynthia Grenier Day Care Deception: What the Child Care Establishment Isn't Telling Us by Brian C. Robertson (Encounter, 222 pp., $25.95...
...Of course, maybe the woman just likes smelly men...
...In the late 1960s, radical feminists began to supplant the "maternalist" feminists who had once fought to ensure that the children of fathers who were unable to support their family could still be cared for by their mothers at home...
...Perhaps aware of her fawningschoolgirl tone, periodically she reminds her readers about his odor: “his smell overtakes me again: mountain and dirt and unwashed skin and heat,” and "the man who is only warm, smelling of moss ground, . . . his skin tacky to the touch with dried sweat...
...Some even admit their research is influenced by a hope for results that won't make working moms feel guilty...
...Along the way, Robertson recounts the history of the child-care movement, beginning with the Lanham Act of 1941, which funded centers for the children of female defense workers...
Vol. 9 • February 2004 • No. 20
