A thoughtful and radically provocative collection.
A distinguished Mexican American writer meditates on the place of Xicanx culture in what he sees as a sick and increasingly fragmented global society.
Reacting in part to the political upheaval and chaos that have characterized the last decade, Rodriguez (Borrowed Bones: New Poems From the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, 2016, etc.) offers 12 essays that reflect on the meaning of identity while offering a vision of a more humane world. In “The End of Belonging,” the author responds to Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican rhetoric by celebrating his Native American ancestry, which predated the European conquest of the Americas. As the descendent of Indigenous people, he sees himself as a child of the Earth who transcends the fabricated boundaries of nation. “I belong anywhere,” he writes. To counterbalance what he sees as the disease of capitalism brought to the Americas, Rodriguez advocates for a new “mythic imagination” in the essay titled “The Four Key Connections.” Through myths, people can find “sustenance for mind and soul.” Poetry is another avenue of healing the author believes society should explore. In “Poet Laureate? Poet Illiterate? What?” he discusses poetry as “medicine” that can not only “impact [but] change this world.” Throughout the book, Rodriguez speaks about Xicanx cultural achievements with pride. In “I Still Love H.E.R,” he discusses the Xicanx–hip-hop connection and the influence of that connection on recording artists around the world. In “Low & Slow in Tokyo” he describes the impact of Xicanx popular culture on anti-establishment Japanese youth. In speaking about himself, Rodriguez is, as always, honest and forthright. In “Men’s Tears,” he speaks openly about his violent gang past and the lesson he eventually learned that “men should cry more, connect more, feel more.” “The Story of Our Day” details the author’s unsuccessful but impactful 2014 Green Party bid for California governor, a campaign that emphasized nothing short of revolutionary change. Powerful from start to finish, Rodriguez’s book celebrates Xicanx culture and wisdom while calling for much-needed global healing.
A thoughtful and radically provocative collection.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60980-972-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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