An unusually creative memoir of a bicultural life.
An “ordinary girl” rebels against her unstable life in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach until military service helps her gain a life-altering self-confidence.
Growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico, Díaz (editor: 15 Views of Miami, 2014) tossed aside the blonde-haired Barbie dolls her elders gave her. “They always made me feel ugly, the brown kid who would never look like her white mother,” she writes in her inventive debut memoir. It didn’t help that her philandering father sold drugs, her mother showed alarming signs of her soon-to-be-diagnosed schizophrenia, and only her loving grandmother provided a stable presence in her life and those of her two siblings. Hoping for better, her father moved the family to Miami Beach when Díaz was in elementary school. But the money ran out, and the family was evicted repeatedly from shabby apartments. As “a closeted queer girl in a homophobic place,” the author couldn’t adjust, kept getting arrested, and ended up in Narcotics Anonymous and a juvenile detention center. Depressed and desperate to end the free fall, she dropped out of high school at 16, married at 17, and made a life-changing move at 18, enlisting in the U.S. Navy. As she aced military tests, her faith in herself grew and led eventually to a graduate degree and a literary career that has earned her two Pushcart Prizes. Using flashbacks, shifts in tense, and other novelistic devices, Díaz weaves impressionistic vignettes about Puerto Rican history and culture into her story, which begins when she watches an activist’s funeral procession in Puerto Rico in 1985 and ends after a recent visit to the island in the wake of Hurricane María. Along the way, she withholds key dates and other facts that would have made it easier to put some events in context. However, the literary bells and whistles give her story a broader interest than many memoirs that are more solipsistic. This book isn’t just about the author’s quest for self-determination; it’s also about Puerto Rico’s.
An unusually creative memoir of a bicultural life.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-913-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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