Potent, emotional essays that speak to the relatable experience of rising above a harrowing childhood.
Castro (English and Ethnic Studies/Univ. of Nebraska; Hell or High Water, 2012, etc.) ponders her troubled adolescence and who she is today.
Adopted and raised by a Cuban American family of Jehovah's Witnesses, the author reflects on her search for her true identity. As a child, she was required to proselytize for the church and was subjected to starvation and sexual abuse by her stepfather, conditions she knew were wrong. However, she was "raised to be seen and not heard,” and so Castro learned to put her head down and endure. "Forbidden to go to college," she ran away at the age of 14 to live with her adoptive father. Despite becoming a single mother at 20, she continued her education, earned a doctorate, and later, tenure at Wabash College. Regardless of her achievements, Castro continued to search for understanding and identity through her teaching, her writing, her reading of Latino literature, and the raising of her son. As an adoptee, she had always believed her biological mother was a Latina and assumed the role of a Latina herself, only to have this myth crushed at 26 when she met her mother and found out her true ethnic background. "In one sudden yank of the rug,” she writes, “I felt my family and identity severed from me. I didn't know where to stand." Throughout her life, Castro has had to redefine her identity, both to herself and to others. These powerful transformations form the backbone of this slim volume of visceral pieces.
Potent, emotional essays that speak to the relatable experience of rising above a harrowing childhood.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8032-7142-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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