Stark in its portrayal, but more riveting and embroiling than brutal or repellent.
First-time writer Mendoza tells the story of his rise through the ranks and his ultimate escape from a powerful criminal organization.
The character John “Boxer” Mendoza turns to drugs and crime at an early age, so it’s perhaps inevitable that the violent robberies he commits land him in jail. There, he becomes a member of the gang Nuestra Raza, an extension of Nuestra Familia. Mendoza is in and out of prison for drugs and parole violations, until the day when the three-striker faces a long stretch, and his loyalty to NF is suddenly in question. The book concentrates on Mendoza’s time in NF, although in the foreword, Mendoza explains that he doesn’t want to glamorize the gang life. Instead, he reveals an unvarnished world where violence reigns. The narrative is sometimes cold, merely relaying the events that lead to the next incarceration, and it’s hard not to view Mendoza as apathetic. But he shows his emotion in response to NF’s malicious treatment of certain members, leaving some of them to fend for themselves, and he regrets disappointing his ailing wife, Vicki, especially when he’s in jail and she’s left alone. The author clearly knows how to tell a story: He opens the narrative with the police raiding his house and dragging him outside; he discusses the disconcerting Operation Black Widow; and he’s prone to metaphors. There’s even an antagonist: Lencho, his “antithesis,” who is Mendoza’s greatest adversary during his longest (in terms of the narrative) stint in prison. Surprisingly, the book’s highlights are Mendoza-free: The novel reveals the fascinating origin of the Mexican Mafia, as well as the NF’s response to the Aryan Brotherhood, a certain attention-grabber.
Stark in its portrayal, but more riveting and embroiling than brutal or repellent.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1478222804
Page Count: 508
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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