A salsa-spiced memoir of a “Latina gringa,” who struggles with career, marriage, motherhood, and the push-pull of her Mexican heritage vs. the ambitious, independent woman formed in “gringo-landia”—the United States. Author Hinojosa is a CNN correspondent and host of the National Public Radio show “Latino USA.” A winner of several professional awards, named as one of the 100 most influential Latinos in the United States, satisfied in her work and in her marriage to a talented artist from the Dominican Republic, she wanted more. She wanted a child. This is the vividly told story of Hinojosa’s efforts to conceive and to become the madre that her own Mami and tias were. Through two much-mourned miscarriages and a lamented Cesarian (she wanted to bear her child “naturally,” as her Mexican forebears had done), she and her husband had a son, Raul. Difficulty in breast-feeding led to fear that she was “a total loser,” followed by all the usual guilt about her adequacy as a mother, compounded when she returned to work. But her son survived and thrived, and armed with new patience and self-confidence, she and her husband had another baby. So far, so ordinary. But this story is far from ordinary, replete with loving, funny, sad, and always colorful stories of Hinojosa’s family and childhood in Mexico and Chicago, the news stories she has covered (from riots and drug dealers to a blind subway singer), her visit to a Yoruba priest who prescribed wearing five yellow scarves to hasten conception, her plunge into alternative therapies after a bout with typhoid, and life in the New York City barrio with drug dealers on every corner she and her husband chose to stay. A lusty tale of coming to womanhood that reconciles past and complex present in a way that will resonate with all women, Latina or no. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88445-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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
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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