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
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A vivid, engaging, and engrossing collection from one of American literature’s great letter writers.
Famed for such chillers as “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, Jackson reveals a warm, witty side in her voluminous correspondence.
There’s still an edge to the hilarious domestic vignettes she sends her parents, clearly the raw material for the now less famous magazine pieces collected in Life Among the Savagesand Raising Demons: Tending to four rambunctious children while cranking out the magazine pieces and novels on which the family income depended was a perennial challenge. Husband Stanley Edgar Hyman, a professor at Bennington for most of his career, never made much money, and his urgings to Jackson to get back to work form a disquieting undercurrent to the generally cheerful letters. The earliest letters are her lovestruck missives to Hyman when both were students at Syracuse University, but an angry letter from 1938 reveals a darker side to their relationship, delineated in more explicit detail 22 years later. Her anguish over his unrepentant womanizing and habit of demeaning her in public while ignoring her in private makes a heartbreaking counterpoint to delightful portraits of family activities that also ring true but tell only part of the story. The dark side so evident in Jackson’s fiction is kept for her work, but we see its origins in a 1938 letter to Hyman declaring, “you know my rather passive misanthropic tendencies, and how i [sic] hate this whole human race as a collection of monsters.” Jackson’s avoidance of capital letters adds to her correspondence’s charmingly idiosyncratic flavor, though she adheres to more conventional punctuation in letters to her agents Bernice Baumgarten and Carol Brandt, which offer candid snapshots of a working writer’s life. Later letters chronicle without self-pity the years of declining physical and emotional health that preceded her untimely death at age 48 in 1965.
A vivid, engaging, and engrossing collection from one of American literature’s great letter writers.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13464-1
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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