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
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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