A fresh, indispensable look at the wide, multicultural world of Latine women writers.
A significant collection of Latine women voices across five centuries.
Inspired to “disrupt erasure and myths,” Guzmán, who comes from an Indigenous Caribbean clan, hopes these selections from 34 nations—translated from 21 languages, including 17 “native mother tongues of the Americas”—will establish “a new literary canon.” The work is divided into 13 sections, representing the 13 moons of the year. Thirteen, notes Guzmán, “is considered a sacred and holy number, and another word for ‘god’ in the Maya tradition.” In addition to Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners, poets laureate, a Nobel laureate, and international bestselling authors, Guzmán highlights many lesser-known names, such as the late Honduran water protector Berta Cáceres, of Lenca Indigenous descent, the winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize. In an excerpt from her acceptance speech, she urges her listeners, “Let us wake up! Let us wake up, humankind! We’re out of time. We must shake our conscience free of the rapacious capitalism, racism, and patriarchy that will only assure our self-destruction. Our Mother Earth, militarized, fenced in, poisoned, a place where basic rights are systematically violated, demands that we take action.” Some of the more famous names include Jamaica Kincaid, Giaconda Belli, Edwidge Danticat, Laura Esquivel, Audre Lorde, Sandra Cisneros, Anaís Nin (daughter of Cuban parents), Ada Limón, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Guzmán also includes the voices of trans and nonbinary writers. This post-colonial, inclusive compendium will be an excellent literary source for libraries and schools. Guzmán succeeds in her presentation of “a luminous universe of texts that navigate across time and space, genre, styles, and traditions,” and the book does indeed contain “the wisdom, memory, and DNA, or oral traditions more ancient than time itself.” Other contributors include Cristina Rivera Garza, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Julia Alvarez, Ruth Behar, and Irma Pineda.
A fresh, indispensable look at the wide, multicultural world of Latine women writers.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9780063052574
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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