Angry autobiography of a Mexican-American who survived the gang wars of the late 60's and early 70's. (Excerpts text have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, TriQuarterly, etc.) Nowadays, Rodriguez is a poet, editor, and publisher, but during his teenage years, he was a full-fledged participant in la vida loca (``the crazy life''), the barrio gang experience. He writes this memoir to awaken his son Ramiro to the dangers of the clicas before it's too late. For Rodriguez, childhood was a time of poverty and despair, in which his family's journey from Mexico to America brought memories that ``stay with me like a foul odor.'' His father, ``an unfeeling, unmoved intellectual,'' and his mother, ``full of fire,'' offered some stability—but not enough. School added nothing but incompetent teachers and violent playmates. By age 13, Rodriguez was tattooed, deep into drugs and sex, experienced in gang warfare. His life spiraled downward into a hell of armed robbery, paint-sniffing, heroin-shooting, attempted suicide. He bounced in and out of jail, fighting police who ``in the barrio...are just another gang.'' He took up boxing: ``I came to kill. I rushed up to my opponents and mowed them down.'' Then Rodriguez—by now enrolled in a new high school—discovered student activism. He became a student journalist, president of the Chicano Club, a spokesman for the Mexican-American student community. He began to write, won a literary contest, attended Cal State, and turned his life around. Looking ahead, Rodriguez sees a ``more severe and uncertain path'' for his son and other Latinos. Here, his ever-present political analysis, in which authorities exercise ``a genocidal level of destruction'' against ``expendable'' youth, may be too fueled by bitterness to persuade entirely, but his fiery portrait of youth caught in a dead-end system lingers in memory. A song of the streets, fortissimo.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-880684-06-3
Page Count: 247
Publisher: Curbstone Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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