A plea for transnational identity in the spirit of Tobar’s hero, Che Guevara.
An apt collection of essays exploring the increasing prevalence of Hispanic culture in North America, by an L.A. journalist now based in Argentina.
Guatemalan by birth and raised in L.A., where he cut his teeth covering the 1992 riots for the Los Angeles Times (sharing a Pulitzer Prize for the effort), Tobar (a novel: The Tattooed Soldier, 1998) casts his net widely in defining Hispanic American identity. He pulls in essays ranging in subject from L.A. (“City of Peasants”), where, he notes, the number of Spanish speakers roughly equals that of English-only speakers; to the desperate, porous border of Mexico (“Where the Green Chilies Roam”—chilies being border guards); to the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas and the stream of jornaleros (day workers) who migrate to cities such as Ashland, Ala., to work for the Tyson company; to thriving pockets of Hispanic communities across the heartland. Tobar tracks the “violent and troubled path into Americanness,” quoting from W.E.B. Du Bois and Alexis de Tocqueville. In “Unconquered,” he examines worse-case scenarios, like the hopeless, drug-infested barrios in Cordova, N.M., that are suffering from cultural dislocation and oppression, though he also recounts success stories, such as the Hispanic civil awakening represented by California State Senator Gloria Romero and other Latino activists who have cast off the humiliation of their immigrant roots to proclaim permanence in their adopted land. In “The Old Men and the Boy,” Tobar descends on the conflicted Cubano exile community of Miami, where the immigration fight for young Elian Gonzalez became a national cause célèbre; and visits an aging “hero from another fatherland,” jailed Puerto Rican terrorist Elizam Escobar, still raging about the lack of respect given his people. Although the New York Hispanic community receives glancing attention, Tobar does a magnificent job of portraying the “contradiction and possibility” contained in the words una nacion unida.
A plea for transnational identity in the spirit of Tobar’s hero, Che Guevara.Pub Date: April 7, 2005
ISBN: 1-57322-305-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
© 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.
