A confident, witty tale of triumph and sacrifice.
A bold, inspiring debut memoir by the first female ironworker in the state of New Mexico.
Padilla is the second of nine children raised in a “humble two-bedroom home” by hardworking parents without high school diplomas. She recalls the Spanish culture in her upbringing: “women usually learned at an early age that one important role in their lives was the care of family, especially the men.” Independent, ambitious and determined, Padilla had no intention of letting her gender dictate her career. At 26, despite opposition from men and women alike, she became an apprentice under Ironworkers Local 495. Her desire “to learn a skill and have a title with responsibilities” propelled her through the difficulties of her first post as “one female among twenty-five-hundred [men] at the power plant.” A talented ironworker, Padilla developed an excellent reputation and the respect of most of her colleagues. Though her personal life isn’t at the forefront of her story, she describes her unsuccessful first marriage and her wonderful second one. She’s also generous with praise for peers as well as herself—a tendency that occasionally weakens the narrative. It’s clear that her colleagues’ admiration of her is well-earned, but there are times when the repeated references to this err on the side of boasting: “I worked hard and did a good job, making it look easy.” Nonetheless, her awe for the craft is unwavering: “[I]ronworkers are artists—make no mistake about that.” The descriptions of workplace conflict grow tedious—“I had again to prove that I was up to the task”—perhaps since Padilla repeatedly faces the same obstacles. She sustains two significant injuries during her career, the second of which occurs during a negative experience in which she faces “cliques…just as in high school,” forcing her to stop “work[ing] in iron.” Although the final pages show an ugly underside of the “brotherhood,” the overall tone is one of good cheer. “I knew I would face many firsts,” Padilla writes. “I just hoped I lived to talk about them.”
A confident, witty tale of triumph and sacrifice.Pub Date: April 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1468566949
Page Count: 236
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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