A decent enough piece of journalism, but lacks the insight and emotion to make a real impact.
The daughter of a Mexican-American mother and a Caucasian father uses her biracial heritage as a platform for her examination of the political and identity crises facing many people in Mexico.
Griest (Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana, 2004, etc.) digs into both sides of the immigration debate. She befriends undocumented workers in the United States who are proud to send American dollars home to pay for food, clothes and school, and she speaks with Mexican immigration officials and locals who lament the “Americanization” of those who return and the abandonment issues facing those left behind. In the face of globalization, accelerated by NAFTA and television, indigenous groups in Mexico must also make tough choices about whether to preserve their ancient languages and culture. Facing pressures to assimilate, they are slowly folding into the Spanish-speaking multitude and sacrificing some of their heritage along the way. Dual identity and the struggle for self-acceptance are global themes these days, and Griest’s attempt to resolve this conflict with her travels can be commended for its pluck, though the whole project seems rather muddled. She strings together disparate interviews and occasional adventures: her investigation into the murder of a gay political activist; the violent repression of a liberal newspaper; a teacher’s strike in Oaxaca; the quinceañera of a friend’s daughter; the 2006 presidential election, marred by voter fraud. Griest quickly deduces the parallels between the Mexicans’ search for self-discovery and her own, but misses the larger point: They struggle for identity as a means of survival; she uses it as fodder for a book.
A decent enough piece of journalism, but lacks the insight and emotion to make a real impact.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4017-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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