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
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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