A heartfelt chronicle of a young Cuban refugee’s experiences in the United States.
A memoir of childhood by a Cuban exile.
Martínez (The Ballerina and the Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich, 2014, etc.) recounts his experiences as part of Operación Pedro Pan, a secretive program in the early 1960s that brought 14,000 Cuban minors to the United States. Martínez begins with vivid memories of landing in Miami on April 23, 1962, when he was 18, and being held for hours in a glass immigration waiting room. He recounts the moment that he realized that his “world had changed”—when his family received a telegram informing them that American visas had been approved for him and his 14-year-old brother, Beni. What others saw as a blessing, a young Martínez saw as a sort of death sentence, stripping him of a bright future as a pianist. Now he was saddled with the responsibility of caring for his brother, and with the expectation that he would secure visas for his parents and sisters, as well. Martínez describes his life in a refugee camp for Cuban youth, his experiences with several foster families, and instances of sexual abuse by adults. He also expresses his exasperation as he witnessed frequent shifts in American relations with Cuba, which threatened to upend his familial duty. Martínez’s prose is accented by creative metaphors, although readers will likely find a few of them offensive, such as his description of “a Haitian woman of undetermined age” who “sported a nose that spanned two continents.” Overall, the text effectively underscores the author’s love of music, as it starts with a turbulent movement of upheaval, crescendos as he took control of his own future, and ends with a coda of self-reflection. Along the way, Martínez’s writing earnestly explores many aspects of coming of age; this includes his sexuality, which plays a central part in his narrative. Over the course of the book, he describes his struggles to understand his feelings of same-sex attraction in an atmosphere of cultural and religious intolerance.
A heartfelt chronicle of a young Cuban refugee’s experiences in the United States.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5009-5218-1
Page Count: 282
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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