Too bad the author failed to include an epilogue about his present-day successes (he’s a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and...
Poignant, heartfelt memoir of a gay Latino immigrant’s coming-of-age, played out against a relentless backdrop of abuse and neglect.
Poet, novelist and children’s author González (So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until It Breaks, 1999, etc.) digs deep to reveal a tortured childhood as the son of poverty-stricken, functionally illiterate Mexican farmworkers. The memoir opens in 1990, when the author was barely 20 and in flight from an abusive relationship with an unnamed older lover. González trekked to Indio, Calif., to reunite with his distant father for a restless, uncomfortable, three-day bus ride into Mexico, where he was raised. The narrative then turns to González’s youth. His father was a selfish alcoholic, his mother sickly, his grandfather increasingly menacing. Scores of relatives also inhabited their half-finished house. The family was uprooted when González’s 31-year-old mother succumbed to heart disease; home became the crime-ridden “government-subsidized cinderblock apartment of the Fred Young Farm Labor Camp.” Her barely teenaged son had furtive sex with older men he met in the grape fields where he worked during his summer vacations. First-love and weight issues soon complicated his life even further. The author delineates his youthful self as strong and resilient, focusing on his aspirations to become a school teacher in spite of a father who was “too busy” to come to his high-school graduation and who tried to dissuade González from taking advantage of a scholarship to attend college in Riverside, Calif. After describing his uneasy arrival at Riverside, the narrative returns to 1990: Oblivious father and resentful son separated soon after their arrival in Michoacán; suffocated by all the painful memories, González reluctantly returned to his abusive lover for a final round of broken bones and bruises.
Too bad the author failed to include an epilogue about his present-day successes (he’s a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and an associate professor of English at the Univ. of Illinois)—it could have transformed this cheerless tale into something inspirational.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-299-21900-3
Page Count: 210
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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