More journalistic guide than history, the book provides a satisfying antidote to average readers’ disturbing ignorance of...
An earnest, informative companion to the PBS series on the largest and fastest-growing minority in the United States: Latinos, now numbering more than 50 million.
Journalist and PBS commentator Suarez (The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America, 2006) notes that, among nations, only Mexico contains more Hispanics than the U.S. “At some point in the 2040s,” writes the author, “a slim majority of Americans will trace their ancestry to people who arrived in this country from someplace other than Europe.” Beginning in the 17th century, Suarez reminds readers that when Englishmen arrived at Massachusetts and Virginia to settle or look for riches while despoiling and killing Indians, Spaniards and colonists from Mexico had been doing the same for 50 years in Florida and the Southwest. After a review of Spanish New World exploration and capsule histories of Mexico, Cuba and Puerto Rico that emphasize their usually painful relations to the U.S., Suarez concentrates on America’s Latino legacy from the 19th century to the present. Two themes predominate: racism and immigration. Although not as murderous as that against blacks, discrimination against Latinos has an equally long and troubled history that turns out to be no less true for white America’s fear of being overwhelmed with Hispanics pouring across our border. True to TV documentary format, Suarez includes the story of an individual with every section. Few will be familiar, yet many should be—e.g., José Martí, the hero of Cuban independence, or Juan de Oñate, founder of the first white settlement in the Southwest. Matters improve greatly as the author approaches the present day and points with pride to famous Latinos from Desi Arnez to Albert Pujols.
More journalistic guide than history, the book provides a satisfying antidote to average readers’ disturbing ignorance of America’s Hispanic heritage.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-451-23814-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celebra/Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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