A little of the incessant be-here-now grooviness can go a long way, though readers inclined to New Age sensibilities will...
Coherence takes a backseat to exuberant, purplish prose in this sprawling saga of a family’s life in Mexico and the US, sequel to Rain of Gold (1991).
Choosing to explain those eponymous senses only in an afterword, Villaseñor writes, “I deliberately didn’t list them anywhere in the text, because if I had, then people wouldn’t have experienced the book.” We’re enslaved, he continues, by the first five senses, “the perfect trap to keep us going around in circles inside of our brain computer” instead of the apparently preferable “heart and soul computers,” sites of senses six through nine. (Ten through thirteen seem to reside in outer space, along with the author’s reasoning.) There’s plenty of heart and soul but perhaps too little brain in Villaseñor’s overstuffed, undisciplined narrative, which centers on the alternately wacky, dreamy, and difficult lives of his parents, grandparents, and cousins, a melting-pot clan of Indians and Europeans who combined to form “a United Force from two different WORLDS!” Many of the countless anecdotes are little more than shaggy-dog stories, although others carry more weight: the saga of his uncle Domingo, who finally found a long-sought gold mine after many misadventures, then proceeded to drink the proceeds; the end-of-days realization by Villaseñor’s mother that she had never told her husband she loved him. The author’s passion and talent for storytelling are evident throughout, as are his radiant good humor and devotion to the wisdom of black-clad crones who pop up from time to time in these pages to bliss out over the joys of eating avocado-slathered corn tortillas and watching “silky-thin clouds out over the sea where the Father Sun, the Right Eye of the Almighty, was setting.”
A little of the incessant be-here-now grooviness can go a long way, though readers inclined to New Age sensibilities will find the ever-enthusiastic Villaseñor a pleasant and engaging companion.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-621077-1
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Rayo/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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