Reveals little of interest about Lady Q or the world she moved in.
The life of a Puerto Rican gangbanger on the cold Chicago streets, dully presented.
Having exhausted his own criminal exploits, Sanchez (Once a King, Always a King: The Unmaking of a Latin King, 2003, etc.) turns to female wrongdoing, as practiced and experienced by “Lady Q.” That was his co-author’s nickname when she was a ruthless member of the Latin Queens, female counterparts of Sanchez and his fellows in the Latin Kings. Growing up in Humboldt Park, Chicago’s gang-ridden Puerto Rican neighborhood, Sonia Rodriguez was alternately ignored and beaten by her near-psychotic mother, whose deadbeat boyfriends often degraded and sexually abused the girl. It’s no shock that Sonia took fast to teen rebellion and gangbanging. By the mid-1980s, she’d joined the Latin Queens and was taking part in drive-by shootings. After she broke the gang’s code by bragging about her affiliations on Oprah Winfrey’s local talk show while her real name and nickname were flashed on-screen, her mother sent her to relatives in rural Pennsylvania. She fell for a cousin, got pregnant and got herself and the child thrown out by her relatives. Back in Chicago, Lady Q caught the attention of Tino, imprisoned head of the Kings. She became his consort during one of her visits to him in jail (the Kings wielded vast power inside as well as on the streets) and vaulted up the chain of command. The predictable fall came with coke addiction and a stint in county; the book closes with some halfhearted talk about redemption. Related in the third person, the story loses much of its authenticity. The co-authors’ narrative style doesn’t help, whipsawing between a flat recital of events and canned bathos like, “The miracle of life has a way of blinding evil eyes and warming cold hearts.”
Reveals little of interest about Lady Q or the world she moved in.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55652-722-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
