A heartfelt witness to the changing political and emotional landscape of the Cuban-American experience.
A Cuban-born academic re-creates a moving emotional journey from Cuba to America.
A cultural anthropologist whose first love was writing poetry and fiction, Behar (Anthropology/Univ. of Michigan; An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba, 2007, etc.) is a stylish writer. Her probings about her complicated Jewish Cuban ancestry and family’s immigration to America mine compelling, relevant issues about identity and belonging. Her love of travel first took root at age 5 with her emigration from Havana with her mother, father and small brother in 1962. The family settled in the Ashkenazi section of Forest Hills, Queens, making ends meet selling “fabric, envelopes and shoes.” The young author was thrown, sink or swim, into first-grade, though she knew no English. Bookish and assertive, Behar wanted to pursue her education despite the injunctions imposed by her authoritarian father, and she eventually became a cultural anthropologist, able to use her Spanish for field work among farmers in Spain and Mexico. Her essays meander among these decisive events of her life, circling always back to the place where she began and longed to return: Cuba. She was able to return to her homeland in various capacities over the years, especially as a visiting academic. In “The Freedom to Travel Anywhere in the World,” Behar delineates the glaring discrepancy between her own privileged comings and goings from Michigan, with suitcases laden with plentiful American products, and the dire shortages of and restrictions on her friends and family in Cuba. Yet always, touchingly, she is accorded by her compatriots “political innocence, [and] welcomed with tenderness.”
A heartfelt witness to the changing political and emotional landscape of the Cuban-American experience.Pub Date: April 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5467-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
PROFILES
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
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
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