A deft, illuminating memoir and cultural history.
A Filipino writer explores his racial identity.
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Tizon (Journalism/Univ. of Oregon) emigrated with his family from the Philippines in 1964, “yearning for an equal share of paradise.” Achieving the American dream, they quickly discovered, required them to reject their language, culture and heritage. “Our early years in America,” Tizon writes, “were marked by relentless self-annihilation.” Like his parents, he came to believe that Americans were “strong and capable” and Filipinos, “weak and incapable and deserving of mockery.” Facial features and body size underscored weakness: “Americans did seem to me…like a different species, one that had evolved over generations into supreme behemoths. Kings in overalls. They were living proof of a basic law of conquest: victors are better.” As a child, Tizon saw Asians stereotyped as submissive, primitive, treacherous and indistinguishable from one another, lumped together racially as Oriental or, more derisively, yellow. He was especially sensitive to assumptions about Asian males, often portrayed in movies and on TV as servants or the butts of jokes; Hollywood insisted that Asian male power conform “to known clichés—sage, brainiac, martial artist.” Never was a male depicted as a desirable romantic hero. Similarly, Asian women were seen as childlike and “more pliant, more sensual, more sensitive and attentive to the needs of the stronger sex.” Asian women’s attitudes toward Asian males reflected mainstream culture; most Asian women, Tizon noted despondently, wanted to date and marry whites. The author celebrates some substantial changes in Americans’ attitudes as Asians have become more prominent in sports, entertainment and mass media. He came to understand, also, that feeling shame and self-doubt is widely shared: One friend was ashamed of being too tall, another of being too smart, and some told him “in all seriousness that they were ashamed of being white. They felt guilty, undeserving.” Making peace with one’s identity, Tizon concludes, transcends race.
A deft, illuminating memoir and cultural history.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-547-45048-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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