A moving, intellectually powerful memoir of Mexican-American life. Born in San Antonio in 1957, Santos, a journalist and television documentary producer, grew up in an extended family whose elder members remembered a Texas that had not yet become anglicized. Through their eyes, Santos revisits that time, looking deeply into the Mexican past as a way of informing the present. “We may be latter-day Mexicanos,” he writes, “transplanted into another millennium in el Norte, but we are still connected to the old story, aren—t we?” Answering his own question, he continues, that connection is rapidly dying with the loss of the old generation, and with what he considers to be a cultural habit of selective forgetting, for “there is pain enough in the present to go around.” Resisting that habit, Santos writes evocatively of his childhood in la Tierra de Viejitas, “the land of the little old ladies” in whose custody family memories resided. He reconstructs the old San Antonio of daylong movie matinees and weekend barbecues, of visits by relatives from both sides of the border, of the quotidian life of men and women who considered themselves exiles but who refused to feel oppressed or downtrodden; that San Antonio, he writes, is now gone, with places like the Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood having taken their place. Santos probes the silences of childhood, the things those viejitas left unspoken, the terrible (and sometimes humorous) family secrets. His quest for roots eventually takes him deep within Mexico, where he explores the Indian and Spanish roots that shape modern Mexican-American identity. Santos’s fine memoir is sure to find a wide readership, especially in courses in ethnic and Mexican-American/Chicano studies.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-86808-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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