Wide-ranging and compelling interviews with Latinas who are making a difference in Wisconsin.
Midwestern Latina activists share their stories in a book introduced by Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the group that became the United Farmworkers.
In this collection of oral histories from two dozen female leaders of Wisconsin’s Latinx community, collected as part of a statewide research project, Arenas and Gómez show the community’s diversity while celebrating people who have pushed for progress in education, health care, and workers’ and tenants’ rights, among other causes. In her foreword, the much-honored Huerta, the co-founder with César Chavez of the forerunner of the United Farmworkers, tells how she found her llamda, or calling. The rest of the book consists mainly of edited interviews with the featured women and a brief concluding section focused on themes found throughout the project. The activists interviewed represent a range of ethnicities and origins as well as varied careers and interests. Some of the women are immigrants, while others are U.S.-born. Many are of Mexican or Puerto Rican descent, but the book also includes women of Salvadoran, Cuban, and Spanish heritage; some grew up in poverty and others in middle-class families. The women discuss their identification as activists, the causes that motivated them to get involved, and their successes and challenges. While the book does not offer a fully comprehensive view of Latinas’ contributions to Wisconsin—the project criteria required women to be 50 or older when interviewed, so younger women are absent—it does an excellent job of presenting the community’s history in an engaging format that reflects the diversity of experiences in the region. One of the book’s strengths is the wealth of detail in the women’s stories. Musician Lupita Béjar Verbeten describes the protest songs she performed on behalf of farmworkers and laid-off employees. Maria Dolores Cruz recalls her unsuccessful but satisfying campaign for the state senate. And Carmen De La Paz explains how her individual activism evolved into a family-wide involvement in the community. The women’s stories are interesting and enlightening, and readers will appreciate their perspective on a group that tends to be underrepresented in books about the Midwest.
Wide-ranging and compelling interviews with Latinas who are making a difference in Wisconsin.Pub Date: May 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-87020-859-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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