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WHAT DROWNS THE FLOWERS IN YOUR MOUTH

Name: WHAT DROWNS THE FLOWERS IN YOUR MOUTH
Author: Rigoberto González
ISBN: 978-0-299-31690-7

A MEMOIR OF BROTHERHOOD

by Rigoberto González ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 13, 2018

A raw, emotionally intense memoir.

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A poet and American Book Award–winning memoirist tells the story of his troubled family and the sustaining relationship he shared with his brother.

González (English/Rutgers Univ., Newark; Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition: Toward a 21st Century Poetics, 2017, etc.) and his family left Mexico for the Coachella Valley when he and his younger brother, Alex, were still children. But the better life they sought across the border in the United States did not materialize. Crammed into a tiny house, 19 family members attempted to make the best of difficult circumstances that included hunger, poverty, and abuse at the hands of a cruel and controlling grandfather. By the time González reached adolescence, he and Alex faced other traumas: the death of their beloved mother and desertion by their father, who relocated back to Mexico without them. The losses impacted each brother deeply: the author “withdrew into a depression that [his] family members called shyness,” and Alex began to spend time with high school dropouts who did little else but smoke and drink. At the same time, loss helped forge the fierce bond that helped both survive loneliness and hardship. Their paths diverged when González became the first member of his family to go to college while Alex returned to Mexico to live with their father. But even as the author immersed himself in his work, his emerging gay identity, and a career as a writer and teacher in New York City, he still maintained a close connection to his brother. That bond became their salvation when each brother faced midlife challenges rooted in the early experiences that had stripped them of parental love and positive role models. For González, those challenges involved alcoholism and unconsciously seeking out abusive relationships; for his brother, they involved coming to terms with what it meant to be a good husband and father. Generous and intimate, González’s memoir offers a riveting account of the bond that saved two brothers from their tortured past while offering lucid glimpses into the meaning of Latino manhood.

A raw, emotionally intense memoir.

Pub Date: March 13, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-299-31690-7

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin

Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE

- BOOK REVIEW
ABUELA IN SHADOW, ABUELA IN LIGHT
by Rigoberto González

- BOOK REVIEW
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY HUNGERS
by Rigoberto González

- BOOK REVIEW
BUTTERFLY BOY
by Rigoberto González

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)