A raw, emotionally intense memoir.
A poet and American Book Award–winning memoirist tells the story of his troubled family and the sustaining relationship he shared with his brother.
González (English/Rutgers Univ., Newark; Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition: Toward a 21st Century Poetics, 2017, etc.) and his family left Mexico for the Coachella Valley when he and his younger brother, Alex, were still children. But the better life they sought across the border in the United States did not materialize. Crammed into a tiny house, 19 family members attempted to make the best of difficult circumstances that included hunger, poverty, and abuse at the hands of a cruel and controlling grandfather. By the time González reached adolescence, he and Alex faced other traumas: the death of their beloved mother and desertion by their father, who relocated back to Mexico without them. The losses impacted each brother deeply: the author “withdrew into a depression that [his] family members called shyness,” and Alex began to spend time with high school dropouts who did little else but smoke and drink. At the same time, loss helped forge the fierce bond that helped both survive loneliness and hardship. Their paths diverged when González became the first member of his family to go to college while Alex returned to Mexico to live with their father. But even as the author immersed himself in his work, his emerging gay identity, and a career as a writer and teacher in New York City, he still maintained a close connection to his brother. That bond became their salvation when each brother faced midlife challenges rooted in the early experiences that had stripped them of parental love and positive role models. For González, those challenges involved alcoholism and unconsciously seeking out abusive relationships; for his brother, they involved coming to terms with what it meant to be a good husband and father. Generous and intimate, González’s memoir offers a riveting account of the bond that saved two brothers from their tortured past while offering lucid glimpses into the meaning of Latino manhood.
A raw, emotionally intense memoir.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-299-31690-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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
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
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