by Rosario Marín ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2007
Filled with love for America and advice for young Latinas, this curious hodgepodge of a book falls flat.
Lackluster memoir buries an unusual immigrant’s success story in pedestrian prose.
Raised in poverty in Mexico City, Marín moved with her family to California in 1972 at age 14. Three decades later, she became U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. Bright and driven, she found opportunity in adversity. After her first child was born with Down syndrome in 1985, she made it her life’s mission to fight for people with disabilities. She created a support group for Latino families of Down’s children, worked as a state official to protect disabled services against budget cuts and in the 1990s served as Republican mayor and councilwoman of Huntington Park, a mainly Hispanic community. The Latina voice in Texas Governor Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, she was rewarded with the Treasury post, resigning after two years to make an unsuccessful bid for a U.S. Senate seat. Marín’s warmth and humanity emerge in sections of the book. She discusses with feeling her childhood in a loving family, sexual abuse by a great-uncle, the exhilaration of learning that her family’s first American apartment had a telephone and television, the constant worry over the health of her young son, depression after a miscarriage and the thrill of seeing her official signature for the first time on a dollar bill. More often, though, she relies on generic, cliché-ridden exposition that reveals little. This is especially and most disappointingly the case in chapters about her experiences in the Bush cabinet: “It was my honor to travel the country and speak with the many affected by 9/11.” The final third of the book draws lessons from the author’s life and offers seven steps for success, beginning with “1. Always do the right thing.”
Filled with love for America and advice for young Latinas, this curious hodgepodge of a book falls flat.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8645-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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