A disquieting tale of trauma.
A hard journey to freedom.
Making her book debut, Damatac weaves history, mythology, and recipes into an affecting memoir of abuse, grief, longing, and frustration. Born in the Philippines, Damatac left for the U.S. with her family in 1992 and spent 22 years living as an undocumented immigrant before finally emigrating to England, where she is now a British citizen. Her migration, she writes, has taken her “from secrecy to revelation,” “from fear to hope.” The material hardship that her family encountered because of their status as illegal residents was compounded by her father’s violence and abuse. Erupting in uncontrollable anger, he beat her viciously, behavior she ascribes in part to “internalized colonial oppression and shame.” Colonized by the Spanish and Americans, oppressed by the long dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, Filipinos have a long history of being exploited and demeaned. Many recipes that Damatac includes reflect this history. Sisig na Baboy, for one, a stew of pigs’ ears, snouts, feet, intestines, “is what Filipinos eat when all the best parts are taken by occupying American forces.” Filipinos like her parents went to the U.S. in search of a better life but discovered only more exploitation. “Our college-educated, white-collar parents became minimum-wage grocery store workers,” the author writes. Eventually, with the luck of a valid Social Security card, her mother landed a job in a bank, where she was able to rise to higher levels; Damatac worked part time throughout her schooling, handing over her earnings to the father who grew increasingly manipulative and cruel to her and her mother. Diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and ADHD, Damatac made three suicide attempts; on a path to independence strewn with obstacles, including rape, extortion, and betrayal, she has emerged as a survivor, her determination forged by a “lineage of hardship.”
A disquieting tale of trauma.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781668084632
Page Count: 256
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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