by Marina Peralta ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
An intriguing but strangely unreflective memoir.
Peralta, a Mexican woman now living in Southern California, surveys her romantic past and her struggle to understand herself as a bisexual in this memoir.
Growing up in midcentury Mexico, Peralta was told that sexual desire was dirty. Her love for dancing and applause earned censure, too: “Only lower-class women go into show business,” her mother said. She was even criticized for dancing too close to a boy in a socially approved setting in an event hall. “By now I should know that feeling pleasure in my body is wrong,” a 16-year-old Marina concluded. But if desire for boys was wrong, desire for a woman was worse, according to Peralta’s mother. She told her 18-year-old daughter that “[i]t is better to be a whore than a lesbian,” after she found some love notes a woman wrote to Marina. Over the next decades, the author grew up, had a family, started a dance school, got divorced, had lesbian affairs, became a therapist, and moved back and forth between Mexico and the United States. Throughout this memoir, Peralta traces her growing self-understanding as a woman attracted to both men and women. Her story is particularly valuable for readers who wish to understand the social and familial forces that were arrayed against gays and lesbians in the past. But, overall, the memoir often comes off as more emotional than thoughtful about the events of Peralta’s own life. On the breakup of her marriage, for example, the author writes: “I never considered the aftermath of a divorce….I didn’t expect to grieve over my broken marriage or have regrets for the breakup.” The memoir also doesn’t delve very deeply into other people’s experiences—although a final section about the author’s mother does make an effort in that direction.
An intriguing but strangely unreflective memoir.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 283
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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