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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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