With its icy wit, edgy wedding of lyricism and prose, and unflinching look at personal and public demons, Gurba’s...
A gritty memoir exploring gender politics and growing up mixed-race Chicana.
Gifted experimental writer Gurba (Painting Their Portraits in Winter, 2015, etc.) takes a hard look back at her adolescent and early college years in Southern California. A self-described “early-onset feminist,” the author is deeply invested in and intimately aware of the construction of identity. As she explores with wry humor the history of her attraction to women—“I grabbed a magazine and realized boobs were the best thing ever….I was eight but I knew what I wanted”—and how the unique blending of her mother’s Mexican heritage with her father’s Mexican-Polish roots framed her “Molack” (“Mexican” and “Polack”) worldview and influenced her studies at the University of California, she also tells the harrowing story of Sophia Castro Torres, another Chicana, whose fate was less kind. Early in the narrative, which unfolds in spare prose vignettes, Gurba writes, “guilt is a ghost,” and she admits that she is haunted by the memory of Sophia, a migrant worker who was raped and bludgeoned to death on a baseball diamond in Gurba’s hometown. The author not only feels compelled to bear witness to the horrific end of an innocent woman who supported herself picking strawberries and whose life was further erased by the media by being dubbed “a transient”; through the use of inverted chronology, she also slowly reveals her own struggles with PTSD—“the only mental illness you can give someone”—as a survivor of sexual assault by the same perpetrator who killed Sophia. Positioning herself as “the final girl,” the one in horror movies who “gets to live” but “understands that her job is to tell the story,” Gurba attempts to break down walls of indifference, whether through form or probing content.
With its icy wit, edgy wedding of lyricism and prose, and unflinching look at personal and public demons, Gurba’s introspective memoir is brave and significant.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56689-491-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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