Affecting, highly charged, and deserving of broad attention.
Mexican-American scholar/writer/artist Ledesma (Graduate Diversity Director/Univ. of California) recounts his own experience of “the immigrant experience,” with its tiers of risk and layers of aspiration.
Drawing on a mix of prose, sketches, and other drawings that commemorates his emergence as a “critical cartoonist” to match his work in literary critical theory, the author describes his long years “underground” as the undocumented child of undocumented immigrants from Mexico, a “dreamer” who wanted nothing more than to go to college and have a chance at success. “Being undocumented,” he writes, “as I’m sure you can imagine, meant that we always lived with the fear of being caught, that any misstep we took could endanger the entire family.” This fear is why undocumented immigrants tend to be very law-abiding, and when they’re caught, they have developed skillful strategies, sometimes keeping silence, sometimes talking a strange patter of doublespeak. None of that helps in the end; Ledesma writes of his own father saying that no matter how well he spoke English, he still was a target: “la migra will still get you.” A good chunk of Ledesma’s text is given over to an ABC of immigrant life—for example, “R is for the resilience of undocumented immigrant mothers”; “B is for the back pay that was withheld from your father’s paycheck those few years when he worked as a bracero”; “M is for machine, the inevitable result of an immigrant worker’s metamorphosis from human being to mechanical instrument.” Ledesma and his family have been legal residents of the United States since the 1980s, but the old fears remain, he writes, especially given the anti-immigrant sentiment of the new administration. As he writes in closing, “President Trump? Even thinking about the phrase feels as if I am uttering an uncouth incantation. He has stood in front of Weimar multitudes, ratcheting up jack-booted antagonisms targeted towards my people.”
Affecting, highly charged, and deserving of broad attention.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8142-5440-0
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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