Amusing irreverence gives way to a sentimental journey.
Longtime Los Angeles Times columnist and humorist Martinez (City of Angles, 1995, etc.) uses a wide range of travel experiences, mostly with family, as a format for disbursing rants, vents, intimate observations, and credit where credit’s due.
Martinez aims to be helpful. If, for instance, you’re headed to Lourdes, he suggests, “There’s not much to do unless you’re a leper.” His solution? Hit the gift shops and load up on religious kitsch. So much for travel tips. Blown reservations, surly waiters, lost luggage: all the familiar annoyances are grist for the author’s free associations, often mildly profane or scatological, that somehow wander back to elements of the same codified confession: his wife is a jewel; martinis are good but not good for you; his stepfather was an unmitigated bastard; his mother was steadfast and driven, but strangely distant. It was she, he recounts, who, when he was caught stealing as a kid, noted that he was destined to turn bad and “die in Oakland” (hence the title). Bad experiences, like a freezing sojourn in Barrow, Alaska, or being stuck in odoriferous fleabag hotels in Europe, are inevitably compared to the eternal yardstick of Korea, where the author spent more than a year as a combat Marine. On the other hand, his description of his home in Topanga Canyon, outside of LA, is so effusive it makes one want to check in as a guest. It is usually his wife, Martinez admits, who jolts him from his inertia to go out and face the world. He supplies the biases and paranoia; when, for instance, three strangers approach out of the dark while they are stranded on the road in Mexico, the author knows rape and pillage when he sees it. Instead, the men fix his car, refuse any payment, and go on their way.
Amusing irreverence gives way to a sentimental journey.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-29087-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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