A warm, emotionally intimate memoir.
An award-winning poet’s memoir of growing up in Miami as the gay son of Cuban immigrants.
Revolution changed Cuba forever. Yet Blanco’s (For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet's Journey, 2013, etc.) family seemed determined to hang on to whatever they could of the lives they knew before Fidel Castro’s takeover. Once the family settled in Miami, his parents went to work at an uncle’s bodega and ate only Cuban food. Meanwhile, Blanco dreamed of becoming like his gringo school friends who ate “Pop-Tarts, Ritz Crackers and Cool Whip.” He tried to introduce his family to American customs like Thanksgiving, only to see those traditions transformed into something with a distinctly Cuban twist. At the same time, Blanco was still fascinated by the country his family had left behind. Not only did they re-create it through the food they sold and ate, but also through the garden that his grandfather planted with the loquat, papaya and avocado trees that reminded them of their “lost [Cuban] paradise.” Born in Madrid just before his family left Spain for the United States, the author soon realized that he existed in a world that was neither completely Cuban nor American: He was “a little from everywhere.” The homosexual desires that surfaced during adolescence and which he kept hidden from his family only added to his feelings of separateness. As a cure for his love of “unmanly” things like his paint-by-number sets and his cousin’s Easy-Bake Oven, Blanco’s homophobic grandmother sent him to work at the bodega. In this space of working-class machismo, Blanco came into contact with a closeted Cuban homosexual who told him about the forbidden affair he had with another man before fleeing to the U.S. Their friendship started the author on the journey toward accepting not only his own gayness, but also the “ghosts of Cuba” that haunted him.
A warm, emotionally intimate memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062313768
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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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