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YESTERDAY'S TRAIN

A RAIL ODYSSEY THROUGH MEXICAN HISTORY

An unsatisfying rail-and-plane tour of our southern neighbor, ``a nation besieged by its history.'' Pindell (A Good Place to Live, 1995, etc.) has made a minor specialty of traveling across whole nations—previously, the US and Canada—by train and reporting what he has found along the way. He has done well in English-speaking venues, but his account of his sojourn in Mexico will disappoint anyone who knows the country. Pindell announces but doesn't quite work out some idÇes fixes—for example, that Mexico is difficult to understand because it is grounded in ``ancient pre-Hispanic spirituality'' and that in Mexico ``nothing is what it seems on the surface.'' Evidently lacking Spanish (and despite his native Latin collaborator, Ram°rez Mallis, of Keene State College), Pindell concentrates on just those surface appearances, and, from Merida to Hermosillo, he interweaves an impressionistic account of fruit markets and taco stands with the kinds of historical information that one would find in an encyclopedia. That information is too often half-absorbed, and half-understood; for instance, Pindell offers a staggeringly simplistic interpretation of why the US was able to conquer the nation so quickly in the war of 1846, and he fails to grasp the import of the latter-day Zapatista uprising in the southern state of Chiapas. While trying to be a sympathetic traveler, Pindell often condescends to those he is studying; he is especially bad in dealing with Mexico's Indian population, who emerge in his account as innocent people who are universally reluctant to speak with strangers. (In fact, if you have even a smattering of Spanish, you'll find it not so hard to strike up a conversation with them.) Mexico may indeed be burdened by its history, as Pindell asserts. But what nation is not? His book fails to illuminate that history or to cast any new light on Mexico's present troubles.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-8050-3791-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996

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IN MY PLACE

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

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