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MADRE AND I

Name: MADRE AND I
Author: Guillermo Reyes
ISBN: 978-0-299-23624-3

A MEMOIR OF OUR IMMIGRANT LIVES

by Guillermo Reyes ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 27, 2010

A fairly humorless recollection of a hardworking mother, but still an affecting homage to “the boundlessly life-affirming...

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Playwright Reyes (Theater/Arizona State Univ.) casts a grateful eye on the past and his mother’s many sacrifices in a strange land.

An immigrant from Chile in the turbulent 1970s, María brought her “love child” along with her, a boy whose father had at least given his son his last name—“and this fact, my mother convinced me once, pulls me up a notch or two in the hierarchy of bastardom.” María is a thoroughly complex woman, diligent, intelligent and hopeful for a life as a teacher of language and literature. Instead she ended up cleaning houses in Los Angeles, where, in one shining moment, she snuck a snapshot of herself holding the Oscar awarded to a client for producing the movie Annie Hall. For years she told stories of having worked for that famous film tycoon, though finally she confessed that it had really been a friend who was employed by the Hollywood rico. Meanwhile, Reyes was growing up conflicted because of his homosexuality, not to mention the embarassment he felt toward his mother during his teens. Reyes confesses much later, as María lay dying in hospice, that he felt “estranged from her final days,” but not, in the end, from her, who did nothing but sacrifice for him. Much of the book, too, has an estranged feel, a kind of narrative flatness extending over a story that has only a few critical moments. “You write as if you had an accent. You sound foreign on the page,” noted one playwriting classmate. Here, however, Reyes often sounds merely detached.

A fairly humorless recollection of a hardworking mother, but still an affecting homage to “the boundlessly life-affirming memory of her.”

Pub Date: May 27, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-299-23624-3

Page Count: 288

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: March 1, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE | LGBTQ

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NIGHT

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...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
FILLED WITH FIRE AND LIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

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THE TALE OF A NIGGUN
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

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NIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.