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
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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