Tom Gjelten’s latest is what the NYT describes as:
“Mr. Gjelten has had the brilliant idea of telling Cuba’s story through a family and a business that have been at the center of that country for as long as there has been a country, indeed even longer.”
What is it all about, you ask? Well, the reviewer also notes:
“What makes Mr. Gjelten’s book such a standout is its quality of subjectivity. Presenting his history through the lives of people who affected the events they personally experienced and were in turn affected by them, he gives us drama, not chronology or statistics.
Sometimes he dutifully draws back to provide necessary commercial detail about Bacardi, and at those moments the book risks dwindling into a standard business history of a little company and how it grew.”
Publishers Weekly states:
“Bacardi's image as Cuban-nationalism-in-a-bottle becomes farcical when the company, now a multinational behemoth, fights an absurd court battle with Cuba's state rum company over the Havana Club trademark. But Gjelten's account of a liberal, progressive Cuban business clan complicates and enriches the conventional
Read the full NYT review here . Readers can also skim an excerpt from the book if they choose.
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