I
loved Solito. This ismy favorite book from the past year.
This book is written from
the point-of-view of the author, Javier Zamora, as a young boy (Javiercito). The
story focuses on this young boy’s journey from Ecuador to America. It is an
immigration story, but one that is imbued with the wonder and emotion of a
child.
There are treacherous moments, but also moments of such ardent love that
I needed to weep. We read to learn and be transported. In this book, I learned a
lot of Spanish and Central American music. I was also transported with these tired
masses making this dangerous trip.
It reminds all of us that every immigration
story is ultimately a deeply personal one. I wish everyone could read this.
'Heartbreaking... A rare, eye-opening rendition of the brutal reality of border-crossing.' Lea Ypi
'If there's any justice, Solito will someday be considered a classic.' Rumaan Alam
Young Javier dreams of eating orange sherbet ice cream with his parents in the United States. For this to happen, he must embark on a three-thousand-mile journey alone. It should last only two weeks. But it takes seven.
In limbo, Javier learns what people will do to survive - and what they will forfeit to save someone else. This…
Dave Egger’s memoir is about his early years as the adult caretaker of his younger brother after the death of both their parents. This is an energetic and writerly work.
His
writing screams “Look at me” with its sharp and distinctive style. He writes
that he wants to be heard, that he wants to be understood, and his writing demands
this of you.
There are stories of him starting a magazine and him trying to
get into MTV’s The Real World. My memory of the book is a scene of him and his
brother playing frisbee. It is told in a dramatic and elevated manner, their
throws monumentally heroic, the disc cutting the air between them, their
catches amazingly acrobatic.
You sense this is how a young hero should see
himself in his own story. Surely this is worth seeing, he asks, and I thought:
absolutely!
The author chronicles his life in the years after the deaths of his parents, when he assumed responsibility for the care and upbringing of his eight-year-old brother.
Karyn Freedman has written a superb but difficult
book. It is a close look at her own rape by a stranger while she was in Paris, traveling as a college student.
The book is a memoir using the lens of this one
event. The book is also a scholarly look at rape and its societal causes. It succeeds
at both points of view. She documents her ongoing recovery and the power of
psychotherapy.
It was illuminating for me to see how this process worked. She writes
that rape is often seen as a personal problem but declares that rape is a social
issue with deeply set causes.
She makes persuasive arguments backed up by a study
she did on rape in Africa. Despite its difficult and intimate subject matter,
she was able to remain unflinching in her focus, and her book is powerful
because of it.
In this powerful memoir, philosopher Karyn L. Freedman travels back to a Paris night in 1990 when she was twenty-two and, in one violent hour, her life was changed forever by a brutal rape. One Hour in Paris takes the reader on a harrowing yet inspirational journey through suffering and recovery both personal and global. We follow Freedman from an apartment in Paris to a French courtroom, then from a trauma center in Toronto to a rape clinic in Africa. At a time when as many as one in three women in the world have been victims of sexual assault…
I Couldn’t Keep it to a Tweetis a collection of short essays by long-time blogger and small-time writer Rick
Umali.
His pieces are about living an ordinary life, working in high-tech,
parenthood, and sports. The book is gentle and full of fond feelings. These
posts have existed on the Internet since 2001, and they have touched at least a
handful of people.
When Rick was growing up, he cherished reading small
articles/essays in newspapers, and this book is inspired by those old
observational pieces.
