by Gil Garcia ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2014
An often entertaining memoir that brings the Garcia family to life.
Awards & Accolades
Google Rating
In this debut memoir, an artist recalls growing up in a large, tumultuous family in 1940s South-Central Los Angeles.
Born in 1942, Garcia was one of five children in a close-knit Mexican-American clan living in the Florence district of LA’s south side. Although money was tight and discipline sometimes strict, he remembers his childhood fondly, including days spent playing games and exploring with neighborhood kids; his mother’s cooking; camping trips; holidays; and evenings that the family spent listening to the radio. He tells of events during the years 1942 through 1954, in mostly chronological order. Each chapter starts with a list of that year’s top movies, songs, television shows, fashion icons and news events, which will provide readers with helpful context. The vignettes illustrate important episodes and themes, such as his two older brothers’ constant rivalry—which sometimes erupted even while they were serving as altar boys. At the Garcia house, church was an important part of their lives: “Father would abruptly knock three times…and in his heavy Dutch-accented voice bellow out, ‘Wake up, you bums; it’s time for Mass!’ ” Garcia’s tone throughout is humorous and affectionate, but not everything he relates about 1940s Los Angeles was idyllic. For example, there was gang violence, polio and child-beating nuns; Garcia even witnessed a Mother Superior punch a grade-schooler in the jaw: “That uppercut would have caught Joe Louis by surprise.” Some readers may find it hard to view the hard physical punishment of small children as tolerantly as the author does; at one point, for example, when Garcia was 3, he messed with his grandmother’s face powder and got “a whack to my butt that would knock a conquistador right out of his armor.” Mostly, however, the author focuses on happy memories of caring parents and a warm extended family; although kids today might see him as deprived, with no TV or video games, for Garcia, “[i]t was a time when children’s creativity was fueled by need, a time when we learned to make do with what we had.” Garcia, who later became a restaurant designer and artist, illustrates the book with his own paintings.
An often entertaining memoir that brings the Garcia family to life.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495456039
Page Count: 286
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
Awards & Accolades
Likes
21
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
National Book Award Winner
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ta-Nehisi Coates
BOOK REVIEW
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.