A striking firsthand account of war and the disorientation of the immigrant experience, told candidly and without self-pity...
In his debut memoir, Mankus traces his origins as a refugee from war-torn Lithuania during the waning years of World War II, when Russian occupation grimly loomed like the German bombardment that preceded it.
Mankus’ narrative reveals the devastating changes forced on Lithuanian families in the early 1940s, when they measured the benefits of escaping oppression against the inestimable costs of leaving behind their homes, culture and traditions. Mankus uses a direct, unadorned style, sometimes heartbreaking in its simplicity, as in the brief yet poignant scene of his mother giving her beloved cow a kiss goodbye. His tragedy, and that of the many others who fled their homes for squalid displaced-person camps, needs no adornment. The book follows his circuitous path from one such camp to a hardscrabble childhood in New Jersey, where his family settled, then through several false starts in his attempts to make a life for himself as an adult. The pacing can be problematic, however: The story, a strictly chronological account of Mankus’ life, gives equal or disproportionate weight to moments big and small. His father’s imprisonment on manslaughter charges, for running over a man with a military truck while driving drunk, is presented as an aside, but Mankus’ later work as a tax collector for the IRS, which he describes as tedious and mundane, takes up several chapters. And the abrupt, declarative style that works well in describing the atrocities of war comes across as terse and choppy in tender moments, such as his mother’s death: “She died October 10, 1988. She was eighty-two. She’d had a hard life.” At times, the thread that binds the narrative together—Mankus’ struggle to derive identity and meaning from the brutality of his early experiences—is abandoned, leaving readers craving more reflection and deeper insight.
A striking firsthand account of war and the disorientation of the immigrant experience, told candidly and without self-pity by a narrator who has yet to make meaning of it all.Pub Date: May 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481808651
Page Count: 286
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
