A hopeful memoir that offers timely insights into why people choose to leave their native lands for new lives in America.
In Anderson’s debut memoir, two Argentinian sisters embark on an overland journey to the United States that will change both their lives.
The author and her sister, Marta, were the daughters of a Peronista who found it impossible to work and adequately support his family after Juan Peron’s fall from power. In the summer of 1968, the 20-something sisters decided to leave their dysfunctional family behind under the guise of a trip north, from which they didn’t intend to return. With $250 in traveler’s checks, train tickets to the Argentine city of Salta and a list of potential contacts throughout South America, the girls luckily found hosts and helpers to facilitate their journey northward, and avoided political disturbances that could have stopped them in their tracks. To the author, whose life had been marked by deep distrust, the kindness of strangers was more of an eye-opener than the journey itself. After the two women wound up in Denver, they began their American lives as nannies—the traditional lot of so many Latina immigrants. Later, the author, despite being a high school dropout, found work in the nascent computer industry and ultimately graduated from the University of Colorado. Their parents eventually followed them, and typically, their father shipped them the family dog, unannounced, as the only warning that they were on their way. Their parents both found work that helped them emerge from the frustration and depression that made their lives in Buenos Aires so unpleasant. The memoir skillfully and organically provides flashbacks of the sisters’ lives in Argentina that illuminate their family relationships and put their experiences in the broader context of Latin American politics and history, contrasting them with those of other hopeful emigres they meet. In an era dominated by anti-immigration rhetoric, this memoir serves as a salutary reminder of the reasons that people take the drastic step of immigration, and the innate goodness of those who help them along the way.
A hopeful memoir that offers timely insights into why people choose to leave their native lands for new lives in America.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493725946
Page Count: 378
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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