by Diane Roberts ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2004
A raucous but also sensitive and insightful view of why the Sunshine State really is different.
The author tracks her Florida family branches back some eight generations as evidence that the state’s history is uniquely and often scandalously strange.
Roberts (English/Univ. of Alabama) roamed Tallahassee as a journalist (St. Petersburg Times, The New Republic, etc.) during the Election 2000 debacle. Fidel Castro, she recalls, offered to send “democracy advisers,” a wisecrack that makes it clear her sympathies did not lie (as did those of some of her relatives) with elections supervisor Katharine Harris, whom the author characterizes as duping the press into seeing her as an airhead handmaiden of the Bush dynasty while coolly administering whatever selective disenfranchisement it would take to get the job done. This sardonic account of the post-election scramble serves as preamble to Roberts’s engrossing portrayal of her native land as both charmed and cursed from the day Ponce de Leon first stumbled ashore to sip from the legendary fountain only to receive an ultimately fatal wound. Florida, she deftly argues, has somehow become everybody’s ultimate “second chance”—mostly in the form of perennially virgin real estate lying prostrate for exploitation. Roberts cites, for example, the legislature’s 1924 prohibition of both income and inheritance taxes, officially inviting the lustful rich to overrun the adventurous poor, who had in their own heyday ethnically cleansed the original Seminole inhabitants. Edgy, sarcastic wit peppers a historical narrative dovetailed, to the occasional point of slipped focus, with ancestral ups and downs. Yet Roberts doesn’t spare her own kin when it comes to a good story: hoop-skirted debutantes as poseurs of the Old Confederacy, KKK yips, moonshiners, and power-brokers on the take dot the assembled genealogical roster. State legislator Luther Tucker, for instance, is tabbed apocryphally as someone who dialed up a hooker in the 1950s from a Tallahassee hotel room to find, on her arrival, that they were related.
A raucous but also sensitive and insightful view of why the Sunshine State really is different.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5206-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Reyna Grande ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 28, 2012
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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by Joshua Davis ; adapted by Reyna Grande
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edited by Reyna Grande & Sonia Guiñansaca
BOOK REVIEW
by Reyna Grande
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