A fresh, indispensable look at the wide, multicultural world of Latine women writers.
A significant collection of Latine women voices across five centuries.
Inspired to “disrupt erasure and myths,” Guzmán, who comes from an Indigenous Caribbean clan, hopes these selections from 34 nations—translated from 21 languages, including 17 “native mother tongues of the Americas”—will establish “a new literary canon.” The work is divided into 13 sections, representing the 13 moons of the year. Thirteen, notes Guzmán, “is considered a sacred and holy number, and another word for ‘god’ in the Maya tradition.” In addition to Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners, poets laureate, a Nobel laureate, and international bestselling authors, Guzmán highlights many lesser-known names, such as the late Honduran water protector Berta Cáceres, of Lenca Indigenous descent, the winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize. In an excerpt from her acceptance speech, she urges her listeners, “Let us wake up! Let us wake up, humankind! We’re out of time. We must shake our conscience free of the rapacious capitalism, racism, and patriarchy that will only assure our self-destruction. Our Mother Earth, militarized, fenced in, poisoned, a place where basic rights are systematically violated, demands that we take action.” Some of the more famous names include Jamaica Kincaid, Giaconda Belli, Edwidge Danticat, Laura Esquivel, Audre Lorde, Sandra Cisneros, Anaís Nin (daughter of Cuban parents), Ada Limón, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Guzmán also includes the voices of trans and nonbinary writers. This post-colonial, inclusive compendium will be an excellent literary source for libraries and schools. Guzmán succeeds in her presentation of “a luminous universe of texts that navigate across time and space, genre, styles, and traditions,” and the book does indeed contain “the wisdom, memory, and DNA, or oral traditions more ancient than time itself.” Other contributors include Cristina Rivera Garza, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Julia Alvarez, Ruth Behar, and Irma Pineda.
A fresh, indispensable look at the wide, multicultural world of Latine women writers.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9780063052574
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
An important dialogue at a fraught time, emphasizing mutual candor, curiosity, and respect.
Two bestselling authors engage in an enlightening back-and-forth about Jewishness and antisemitism.
Acho, author of Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, and Tishby, author of Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, discuss many of the searing issues for Jews today, delving into whether Jewishness is a religion, culture, ethnicity, or community—or all of the above. As Tishby points out, unlike in Christianity, one can be comfortably atheist and still be considered a Jew. She defines Judaism as a “big tent” religion with four main elements: religion, peoplehood, nationhood, and the idea of tikkun olam (“repairing the world through our actions”). She addresses candidly the hurtful stereotypes about Jews (that they are rich and powerful) that Acho grew up with in Dallas and how Jews internalize these antisemitic judgments. Moreover, Tishby notes, “it is literally impossible to be Jewish and not have any connection with Israel, and I’m not talking about borders or a dot on the map. Judaism…is an indigenous religion.” Acho wonders if one can legitimately criticize “Jewish people and their ideologies” without being antisemitic, and Tishby offers ways to check whether one’s criticism of Jews or Zionism is antisemitic or factually straightforward. The authors also touch on the deteriorating relationship between Black and Jewish Americans, despite their historically close alliance during the civil rights era. “As long as Jewish people get to benefit from appearing white while Black people have to suffer for being Black, there will always be resentment,” notes Acho. “Because the same thing that grants you all access—your skin color—is what grants us pain and punishment in perpetuity.” Finally, the authors underscore the importance of being mutual allies, and they conclude with helpful indexes on vernacular terms and customs.
An important dialogue at a fraught time, emphasizing mutual candor, curiosity, and respect.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781668057858
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon Element
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A welcome call to grow up and cut out the whining.
The New York Times columnist serves up a cogent argument for shelving the grudge and sucking it up.
In 1976, Tom Wolfe described the “me decade” as a pit of mindless narcissism. A half century later, Bruni, author of Born Round and other bestselling books, calls for a renaming: “‘Me Turning Point’ would have been more accurate, because the period of time since has been a nonstop me jamboree.” Our present cultural situation, he notes, is marked by constant grievance and endless grasping. The ensuing blame game has its pros. Donald Trump, he notes, “became a victor by playing the victim, and his most impassioned oratory, such as it was, focused not on the good that he could do for others but on the bad supposedly done to him.” Bruni is an unabashed liberal, and while he places most of the worst behavior on the right—he opens with Sean Hannity’s bleating lie that the Biden administration was diverting scarce baby formula from needy Americans to illegal immigrants—he also allows that the left side of the aisle has committed its share of whining. A case in point: the silencing of a professor for showing an image of Mohammed to art students, neither religiously proscribed nor done without ample warning, but complained about by self-appointed student censors. Still, “not all grievances are created equal,” he writes. “There is January 6, 2021, and there is everything else. Attempts by leaders on the right to minimize what happened that day and lump it together with protests on the left are as ludicrous as they are dangerous.” Whether from left or right, Bruni calls for a dose of humility on the part of all: “an amalgam of kindness, openness, and silliness might be an effective solvent for grievance.”
A welcome call to grow up and cut out the whining.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781668016435
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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