Undistinguished as memoir or reportage but still of some interest for the unusual circumstances surrounding it.
A ride along the Devil’s Highway—in a nicely air-conditioned sedan.
There was a time, it seems, when if Mexico were to pay for the wall of Donald Trump’s dreams, the government might have approached the Arce family for a loan. Though not in the Carlos Slim category, the author’s mother, for instance, “was responsible for putting Taxco silver on the map all over the United States.” Small wonder, perhaps, that Arce grew up with an entrepreneurial spirit. That spirit alone was not enough to secure her a berth on the lumbering ship that is America; the dramatic heart of the book is a series of episodes when, having landed a very high-powered, very remunerative gig on Wall Street, Arce suffers panic attacks while waiting for the day when her fellow suits, to say nothing of la Migra, discover that she doesn’t have a green card. “I tried to blend in as much as I could,” she writes, “and in the process I lost so much of myself, of my culture, of my Mexican-ness. In that regard, I am a recovering American elitist.” Arce writes from an unusual position; we have plenty of chronicles of crossings by campesinos but none by a country clubber. The author’s travails and turmoils eventually resulted in her leaving Wall Street, two years after getting her papers, to work for immigrant rights (“God—use me,” she implores in an overwrought moment, a tone that, sadly, isn’t an exception). They also resulted in this book, which, though doubtless well-intended, doesn’t pack a lot of punch: “The plight of undocumented immigrants in this country is currently a hot topic again,” she rightly notes, but her engagement is too narrowly circumscribed to speak much to the experiences of the less privileged.
Undistinguished as memoir or reportage but still of some interest for the unusual circumstances surrounding it.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4555-4024-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2016
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
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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