A story of one child of illegal immigrants that has much wider, timely resonance.
Being a child of Hispanic immigrants in modern America.
The American views on immigration took center stage during the 2016 presidential primaries, with Democrat and Republican candidates offering up multiple solutions to the immigration "problem," which this book makes clear is not so easily simplified. Connolly, who has reported on the subject for more than 10 years, puts to rest the idea of a single problem, whether it be the Republican or the Democratic framing of an issue that seems to require more than any one political outlook can address. Living deep in the Midwest with his parents—illegal immigrants from Mexico, years before—Isaias Ramos is a teenager, first and foremost, seeking his way in the world. He wrestles with the questions of postsecondary education versus immediately entering the workplace, following in his parents' footsteps doing manual work. His school recognizes his potential as he handily dispatches various educational assessment exams, ranking sixth in his class and scoring a 29 on the ACT—better than 93 percent of students in the United States. At the same time, the school struggles to provide the resources needed to support the aspirations they have for him. Student aid for children of immigrants proves a bureaucratic mess that ultimately seems to be a dead end. As with nearly any teenager, Isaias' story pulls other teens into its orbit intermittently, as they learn the ways of moving from childhood into adulthood. Isaias undoubtedly grew over the years when Connolly got to know him, blending the transition of teenager-into-adulthood with the transition of a Mexican family into America. There is a wide, almost universal air to the author’s writing, as he alternately tells a narrowly focused story and a broad-based one, making clear that this tale of one family's immigration cannot be told without laying bare the complex context in which it is situated.
A story of one child of illegal immigrants that has much wider, timely resonance.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08306-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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