This sharp autobiographical account deftly illuminates prejudice in the American workplace.
In this debut memoir, a seasoned labor organizer and negotiator details the oppressive discrimination she witnessed and experienced.
In her line of work, Martinez sat across from her share of domineering bosses. Her book, broken up into five stories, highlights the union representative jobs she worked in Oregon and California. For example, as chief spokeswoman for the District Council of Trade Unions, she spearheaded a campaign against Portland when the city planned to cut health care benefits. Discrimination often played a part in city and union bosses’ shady decisions, such as a White building-trade rep “dump trucking” a Black man’s harassment claims—discarding them while giving the impression of a full investigation. As a Mexican woman, Martinez herself has suffered racism and sexism. She made complaints against a male boss with wandering hands while another manager, irate that she was leaving, blackballed her from other job prospects. The author sadly offers only a few glimpses of her personal life. In her opening story, Martinez recounts that, as children, she and her siblings took the brunt of a stranger’s racist jabs at a baseball game. Life-changing events, from her stepfather’s alcoholism to her mother’s unspecified mental illness, receive no more than passing mentions. But Martinez effectively showcases her negotiation tactics. She took inspiration from such works as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, including having employees don blank stickers to signify their “muted speech.” As the author writes in her engrossing book, “Small, direct hits went a long way, left open a vast array of responses for either side to make, and, most of all, minimized risk if a group performed them.” Martinez takes a largely no-nonsense approach when discussing unaccommodating employers and city officials and the times she’s been “run out” of town. But there are occasions when she’s entertainingly flippant, giving certain bosses farcical names like “tongue-wagger” and “office dinosaur.”
This sharp autobiographical account deftly illuminates prejudice in the American workplace.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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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