Paternostro, Silvana

PERSONAL:

Born in Colombia.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY.

CAREER:

Journalist. World Policy Institute, senior fellow.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, Center for Documentary Studies, 1997, for journalism on Cuba.

WRITINGS:

In the Land of God and Man: Confronting Our Sexual Culture, Dutton (New York, NY), 1998.

My Colombian War: A Journey through the Country I Left Behind, H. Holt and Co. (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals, including Paris Review, Spin, Details, Miami Herald, Time, Newsweek, and Washington Post.

SIDELIGHTS:

Silvana Paternostro is a Colombian journalist. Born in Colombia, she moved to the United States to study and remained there, working as a journalist. She has contributed articles to a range of publications, including the Paris Review, Spin, Details, Miami Herald, Time, Newsweek, and Washington Post.

Paternostro published her first book, In the Land of God and Man: Confronting Our Sexual Culture, in 1998. The book discusses the tradition of bisexuality in Latin America where the culture of machoism finds married men having sex with male prostitutes or transvestites but with the negative result of passing on sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS to their unsuspecting wives.

Booklist contributor Whitney Scott commented that "medical and media professionals, public health officials, clergy, and the general public alike stand to learn vitally" by reading In the Land of God and Man. A contributor to Publishers Weekly noted that the author writes "deftly and provocatively," describing the memoir as "an elegantly written, sophisticated analysis of Latin American culture." The same contributor concluded by calling In the Land of God and Man "a beautifully written and astute analysis of complex matters." Nancy Scheper-Hughes, writing in the Women's Review of Books, remarked that "without a hard-hitting alternative program of concerted action, all the nail-biting horror of these stories of rich and poor women alike manipulated by their families, betrayed by their priests and their fathers, and duped by their boyfriends and husbands merely adds up to an angry diatribe against the oppressive fatherland, written by a sexually ‘liberated’ Latina expatriate who wishes that her mother and her ‘sisters’ could be as free as she now is to say ‘fuck’ without blushing and to carry a mint-flavored condom in her purse." Scheper-Hughes appended that "for women living in parts of the world where as many as one in four are already infected with the damnable virus, the knowledge dispensed here is too little and far too late." Kenneth Maxwell, writing in Foreign Affairs, noted that Paternostro has "the skill of a novelist" and that she "has written a powerful and passionate indictment of Latin American sexual culture." Suzanne W. Wood, reviewing the book in Library Journal, "highly recommended" the book, in part due to its "compelling exposition."

In 2007, Paternostro published a memoir called My Colombian War: A Journey through the Country I Left Behind. Here she covers her life as a child in a privileged family, then chronicles her return to Colombia after studying and working in the United States, taking note of the deteriorating conditions there.

A contributor to the Atlantic Monthly observed that "this evocative work succeeds where many similar efforts fail" due to the author's personal experience and knowledge on the topic. A contributor to Publishers Weekly, however, found the opposite, claiming that, "ultimately, the author's decision not to see clearly leaves the reader as confused as she is." A reviewer writing in Marie Claire described the prose as "stunning" and "no-nonsense." Booklist contributor Katherine Boyle felt that Paternostro's interviews and personal experiences help to "reveal the precariousness of life in that South American country." A critic writing in Kirkus Reviews commented that the book's "graceful melancholy and conscientious reporting elevate it beyond the customary journalist's memoir." The same critic referred to the account as "a conflicted memoir of bodegas, bullets, and a country tearing itself apart from within."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Advocate, November 24, 1998, Robert L. Pela, review of In the Land of God and Man: Confronting Our Sexual Culture, p. 81.

Atlantic Monthly, November 1, 2007, review of My Colombian War: A Journey through the Country I Left Behind, p. 155.

Booklist, November 1, 1998, Whitney Scott, review of In the Land of God and Man, p. 457; September 1, 2007, Katherine Boyle, review of My Colombian War, p. 43.

Foreign Affairs, March, 1999, Kenneth Maxwell, review of In the Land of God and Man, p. 148.

Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 1998, review of In the Land of God and Man, p. 1361; August 1, 2007, review of My Colombian War.

Kliatt, January, 2000, review of In the Land of God and Man, p. 29.

Library Journal, November 1, 1998, Suzanne W. Wood, review of In the Land of God and Man, p. 117.

Marie Claire, August 1, 2007, review of My Colombian War, p. 104.

New York Times Book Review, March 21, 1999, Sara Ivy, review of In the Land of God and Man, p. 20; November 16, 2007, William Grimes, review of My Colombian War.

Publishers Weekly, October 5, 1998, review of In the Land of God and Man, p. 73; July 23, 2007, review of My Colombian War, p. 55.

Women's Review of Books, April 1, 1999, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, review of In the Land of God and Man, p. 14.

ONLINE

Salon.com,http://www.salon.com/ (December 3, 2007), Matthew Fishbane, author interview.