A disquieting tale of trauma.
A hard journey to freedom.
Making her book debut, Damatac weaves history, mythology, and recipes into an affecting memoir of abuse, grief, longing, and frustration. Born in the Philippines, Damatac left for the U.S. with her family in 1992 and spent 22 years living as an undocumented immigrant before finally emigrating to England, where she is now a British citizen. Her migration, she writes, has taken her “from secrecy to revelation,” “from fear to hope.” The material hardship that her family encountered because of their status as illegal residents was compounded by her father’s violence and abuse. Erupting in uncontrollable anger, he beat her viciously, behavior she ascribes in part to “internalized colonial oppression and shame.” Colonized by the Spanish and Americans, oppressed by the long dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, Filipinos have a long history of being exploited and demeaned. Many recipes that Damatac includes reflect this history. Sisig na Baboy, for one, a stew of pigs’ ears, snouts, feet, intestines, “is what Filipinos eat when all the best parts are taken by occupying American forces.” Filipinos like her parents went to the U.S. in search of a better life but discovered only more exploitation. “Our college-educated, white-collar parents became minimum-wage grocery store workers,” the author writes. Eventually, with the luck of a valid Social Security card, her mother landed a job in a bank, where she was able to rise to higher levels; Damatac worked part time throughout her schooling, handing over her earnings to the father who grew increasingly manipulative and cruel to her and her mother. Diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and ADHD, Damatac made three suicide attempts; on a path to independence strewn with obstacles, including rape, extortion, and betrayal, she has emerged as a survivor, her determination forged by a “lineage of hardship.”
A disquieting tale of trauma.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781668084632
Page Count: 256
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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