Calling All Heroes: A Manual for Taking Power

Description

The euphoric idealism of grassroots reform and the tragic reality of revolutionary failure are at the centre of this speculative novel, which opens with a real historical event: on October 2, 1968, the Mexican police fired into a crowd of demonstrating students, killing more than 200 and wounding hundreds more. Two years later, 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.

Paco Ignacio Taibo II is the author of 68; Guevara, Also Known as Che; and The Shadow of the Shadow. His biographies of Guevara and Pancho Villa have sold more than one million copies worldwide, and he is the founder and organizer of the annual crime fiction film festival, Semana Negra, held each summer in Spain. He has won numerous international literary awards, including three Hammett Awards and the National History Award from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History. He lives in Mexico City, Mexico.

"Taibo's writing is witty, provocative, finely nuanced and well worth the challenge." --Publishers Weekly "I am his number one fan...I can always lose myself in one of his novels because of their intelligence and humor. My secret wish is to become one of the characters in his fiction, all of them drawn from the wit and wisdom of popular imagination. Yet make no mistake, Paco Taibo--sociologist and historian--is recovering the political history of Mexico to offer a vital, compelling vision of our reality." --Laura Esquivel, author of Like Water for Chocolate "The real enchantment of Mr. Taibo's storytelling lies in the wild and melancholy tangle of life he sees everywhere." --New York Times Book Review "Wild and imaginative rambling it may seem, but Paco Ignacio Taibo's work always conceals absurdly hidden truths, and in this case the absurdly hidden truth concerned the universally condemned massacre of students in Tlatelolco, Mexico, in 1968. The author weaves a highly inventive tale populated by comic book and literary heroes who help the convalescing journalist Ni?1/2stor recall the moment and recreate the tragic events that the Mexican government crudely, yet effectively, sought to erase from the country's official history. Taibo uses humour and an unrivalled inventiveness to shine a light onto the darkness, and the result is intoxicating, and subversive, enchantment." --Latin American Review of Books "It doesn't matter what happens. Taibo's novels constitute an absurdist manifesto. No matter how oppressive a government, no matter how strict the limitations of life, we all have our imaginations, our inventiveness, our ability to liven up lonely apartments with a couple of quacking ducks. If you don't have anything left, oppressors can't take anything away." --Washington Post Book World