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
An eloquent depiction of how birding engenders a deep love of our ecosystems and a more profound understanding of ourselves.
A delightful ode to birds and a powerful defense of the planet we share with them.
In this moving memoir, filmmaker and novelist Kumar explores encounters with birds as meditations on the natural world. Told in a series of vignettes comprised of notable bird sightings, the narrative offers countless magnificent reminders of the beauty and force of nature as well as warnings of human-caused destruction as bird populations plummet due to such factors as habitat loss, water shortages, and changing temperatures. Kumar didn’t take up birding until her 20s, when a chance encounter on the beach with some avid birders and a flock of curlews transformed her life. This experience became her access point to nature, and she nurtured that connection, whether living in urban settings like Los Angeles or, later, rural New Mexico, where “even the winters are sun-drenched.” Through birds, the author was able to revisit the childhood intimacy with her surroundings that she cherished growing up in the heavily forested mountains of northeastern India. “Birds became a portal to a more vivid, enchanted world,” she writes, and “allowed me once again to relish solitude in the way I had as a child.” This sense of enchantment permeates the book as she brings us along on her adventures, including long odysseys to see bald eagles, bobcat sightings through her living room window, and glimpses of the mango-colored tanager in a city park. The author is clearly concerned about leaving a planet rich with wildlife for her children, but her ancestors are also on her mind. She lost both her parents and brother as a young adult, and she connects to their spirits through birds and nature. Ultimately, this is a book about the interconnectedness of generations and ecosystems, and birds are the conduit between the two. “Sometimes it just takes the right bird to awaken us,” writes Kumar.
An eloquent depiction of how birding engenders a deep love of our ecosystems and a more profound understanding of ourselves.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-57131-399-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
It's high spirited reading.
When Françoise Gilot, an aspiring young painter, met Pablo Picasso in May, 1943, she was twenty-one years old, he some forty years her senior.
As they grew together, setting about their mutual campaigns upon each other, she proved herself a worthy adversary rather than acolyte. In the ten years which she shared with him, undertaking to assuage his solitude, bearing him two children, meeting his friend and admirers, she maintained a cool comprehension along with her compassion for Picasso the man that shows to delightful advantage here. For Françoise Gilot has the capacity to reveal the man in his intimate and professional dealings, and Picasso is superlative, inimitable copy. Witness Picasso dangling his agents, foremost among them Kahnweller, fancing with his friends Braque and Matisse, playing cat and mouse with the women in his life -- wife Olga, Marie Therese Walter, Dora Marr, Françoise and her successor Jacqueline Roque. But the author has the capacity as well to show Picasso the artist: she quotes him on painting, describes his method of work in painting, sculpture, pottery. Picasso himself is so articulate that he defies other description; au fond, art and the artist are subversive. His re-marks on art include not only his own but that of his foremost colleagues, Matisse and Braque, Miro, Legor, Chagall...All his encounters here are formed by his own formidable temperament, and recalled in satisfying detail by the woman who shared them. An intimate, vivid, above all intelligent and authentic portrait of Picasso, with its twin elements of love and art, this should sell like mad. And rightly.
It's high spirited reading.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781681373195
Page Count: 384
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1964
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