A Tejano Hesiod grapples with ancestors known and invisible.
A fascinating though convoluted tale of identity by former CBS and PBS TV journalist Santos—the follow-up to Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (1999).
The author’s kin, his mother’s Lopez-Vela and father’s Santos-Garcia families, “were among the founders of the Villas del Norte, the legendary towns created in the last conquistadorial campaign in Mexican history”—what would later become a 40-mile stretch from the frontier towns of Rio Grande City to Brownsville, Texas. Santos traced documents in Seville archives pertaining to the original expeditions of Colonel José de Escandón y Helgueva in the mid-1700s to the area of South Texas that the explorer christened Nuevo Santander, colonizing it with Iberian families and violently subduing the native Indians. The author also unearthed documentation of early land grants bestowed to original Vela relatives, which had only been hinted at by his Uncle Lico, the family’s genealogical chronicler. Santos’s work is an intensive reckoning of personal dimensions, as he wrestles with his family’s mestizo identity in the New World, which was an outgrowth of longer, deeper migrations from ancient civilizations in the North African and Arabian Peninsulas, as he found out from DNA tests. These “palimpsests of worlds” reflect an enormous diversity of colors and ethnic makeup, ending up in “the cosmic mixing of races taking place in post-Conquest Mexico.” As part of his intimate journey from Texas to Oxford to New York City and back to San Antonio, the author creates a kind of ghost, or future literary offspring, from the act of automatic writing, “Cenote Siete.” C7 inhabits a distant land called “La Zona Perfecta,” moving somewhere between “flesh and ether,” and its hallucinatory chronicles of memory, offered in alternating chapters, act as a kind of muse to aid the author in navigating and understanding the fluidity between generations.
A Tejano Hesiod grapples with ancestors known and invisible.Pub Date: April 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02156-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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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