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 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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