A straightforward account of an illegal that comments eloquently on the human cost of globalization.
Legendary newspaper columnist and novelist (I Don’t Want to Go to Jail, p. 347, etc.) Breslin’s revealing and tragic saga of an illegal Mexican worker who perished in a 1999 New York City construction accident.
Eduardo Gutiérrez was born in 1978 into a family of bricklayers in the tiny town of San Matias, three hours from Mexico City. Sun-beaten and dirt-poor, San Matias was a place where one would be lucky to earn $20 a week, so its young men and women dreamed of emigration north to the US, a magical land whose $4 and $5/hour jobs cleaning, cooking, or hauling promised a bountiful future. In 1998, Eduardo made the arduous pilgrimage, paying $1,500 to an immigrant smuggler, known as a coyote, to spirit him across the border. Breslin examines the border-crossing system in detail, describing how the coyotes stash their clients in Mexican border-town hotel rooms until the moment appears right; they then smuggle their charges onto airplanes, force them to wade across rivers with perilous currents, or guide them through deserts where daytime temperatures soar to 120. In New York City, Eduardo lived in a cramped apartment with several other illegals, rarely venturing outside except to go to work, for fear of encountering police or immigration officers. Breslin depicts the illegal’s life as a lonely one, separated from loved ones, barely comprehending American life, with few opportunities for socializing. The author is scathing in his portrait of the Hassidic real-estate developers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn who—rather than employ qualified construction workers at $23/hour—hire men like Eduardo for just $7/hour. Shoddy building standards, backlogged city inspection agencies, and politicians afraid to antagonize the politically powerful Hasids, set the stage for the November 1999 building collapse that took Eduardo’s life. He and his fellow Mexicans knew that the structure on which they worked each day was dangerously unstable; and, predictably, those guilty escaped with minimal punishment. Breslin’s at his best offering crisp reportage about the rough-and-tumble politics of New York City; his writing gets a bit clunky in the sections set in Mexico, which tend to the novelistic. But Eduardo’s story itself is compelling enough to pull the story along.
A straightforward account of an illegal that comments eloquently on the human cost of globalization.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60827-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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