Rating: 
Summary: Stealing Caliban's Advice: On Hunger and Coming of Age
Review: To my surprise, in the index of my eleventh grade American literature textbook, I found my own surname. I quickly turned to the listed page, and I find out what U.S. author shared my name. Richard Rodriguez. I found an excerpt of HUNGER OF MEMORY (1982). I read about the "grandiose" reading program the emerging author embarked upon to become what he believed was "educated." This was to become for me the beginning of such interest in the power and pleasure of words and language.Although many people, including Mexican Ameircans and Hispanic Americans, publicly challenge and denounce the author and his thoughts, I am surprised to find that rarely is the book read in its entirety--a reading that the autobiography merits. Instead, readers tackle the author's political positions of the early 1980s. The autobiography flows with clear prose and addresses issues of language, literacy, schooling, and education. I highly recommend the book for its style and grace. Readers will learn how Richard Rodriguez achieves academic success and the position of a public man.
Rating: 
Summary: Still Controversial--After All These Years
Review: I'm an author of a mystery novel in current release that features a Stanford-educated detective of Latino heritage as its protagonist, an American government/economics teacher (for over twenty years) in a rural California high school with a student population that is over 98% Latino, and I have attended several lectures/discussions by Richard Rodriguez over the years. His HUNGER OF MEMORY remains one of the most controversial books in the community in which I work for a significant portion of every year. HUNGER OF MEMORY is viciously hated by some of the most gifted students I have ever had. Others love it. My fellow professionals argue over Mr. Rodriguez and his positions on assimilation and bilingual education. I respect this book and this man. I don't necessarily agree with all he writes, but I do agree he writes what he writes well. I admire what Richard Rodriguez has gone through in life, and I admire the courage of his positions. HUNGER OF MEMORY is an excellent book that anyone interested in the contemporary American Southwest should read. It is extremely educational.
Rating: 
Summary: SELLOUT
Review: I wont purchase a book by Rodriguez because he is a sellout to himself and his people. The man has consistently come out against affairmative action when he himself is a product of it, and owes his success to it. We all make choices in life and Rodriguez chose to distance himself from his Mexican roots and wants us to validate his choices. Rodriguez is a sucess in the Anglo world but nothing is worth the cost of selling your soul to achieve success at such a high cost. The man is not Mexican he is best described as a pitiful soul that wrote a book trying to find redemption, but you cant have it both ways. Be what you are, take pride in your difference and you can still succeed in this country. I feel contempt not pity for the man.
Rating:
Summary: A must-read for teachers of immigrant and minority students
Review: I just finished reading Hunger of Memory as an assignment for a Language and Literacy class I'm taking in my teacher training program. I recommend this book to all teachers or to people like myself who are planning to be teachers. Rodriguez does a outstanding job of capturing the feelings of confusion and separation one feels when learning English. I liked how Rodriguez corelates language with intimacy. He talks a lot about how Spanish was for him a language of intimacy and family. When he learned English in school, however, he lost a lot of that intimacy in the home when he began to lose his language. One particularly sad part was when his grandmother died and he wasn't able to speak to her or say goodbye beforehand because his Spanish was so limited and his grandmother spoke only Spanish. Towards the end of the book, Rodriguez exhibits a lot of honesty and courage in writing about his feelings on affirmative action. As a result of assimilation and studying in England, Rodriguez no longer felt like he could be an effective role model for minority students. However, because he was a Mexican-American with a Phd in Renaissance Literature and because he was a "minority professor", he was expected by Berkley administrators (and students) to be such a role model. When some hispanic students ask him to teach a minority literature class at a community center, he declines. As a result, they treat him like a sell-out. All in all, I admire how Rodriguez is not afraid to take stances on issues like affirmative action and bilingual education that go against what is expected, considering his race. One would expect him to be in support of both programs, but he is not. Though I do not agree on his stances on these issues, I truly admire his ability to be true to his convictions in spite of being called a sell-out.
Rating:
Summary: A POIGNANT TRANSFORMATION
Review: Richard Rodriguez shares how education transformed his life forever in this searing, poignant, candid autobiography. He became a confident, capable, knowledgable, strong individual who could speak, write, debate, communicate with others beyond the comfort zone of his immediate family. He ultimately amazed elite scholars with his brilliance, but he writes that he lost the close, warm loving affinity with his family, his roots. He is painfully candid. His courageous stance on both bi-lingual and affirmative action programs may make some readers uncomfortable, but his reasoning is sound.Read the book. It is an honest attempt to portray one man's journey from illiteracy. It is the american dream gained, and a detailed passionate account of the price one man paid to achieve it.
Rating:
Summary: A Powerful Book Which Reaches us All
Review: Richard Rodriguez has taken the time to write about what many people experience. An amazing author, Rodriguez takes experiences from his own life, and he extends them to strangers who unwillingly relate. Rodriguez is a Mexican-American man who grew apart from his family in order to gain a "public identity." He does an outstanding job of pointing out how both Mexican and American society simultaneously alienates people for being different. His powerful experiences and writing style can extend to any class, race, age, or gender. His common experiences are what many people have also experienced. Rodriguez does a tremendous job in explaining the public vs. private self, which I have found to be extremely true. A great deal of people in today's society can either compare or contrast their own experiences to his life, which makes his writing so much more powerful than his fellow authors. The issues Rodriguez discuss are all important in society and too many people can relate to his suffering, which says something about society. This is a tremendous book to read, because it makes people reflect on their own life, and take a closer look at how society truly transforms a human being.
Rating:
Summary: Tio Tomas
Review: Richard shed himself to become a white man. He defines himself by the success standards set by white people. Although I don't disagree with him on everything, he clearly has been white washed and it's really sad. HE rants about himself like his 'ethnic' look is so mesmerizing to people. He's got a big head that I really can't empathize with. He made a choice many people of color make, assimilation in most extreme way. If you need a reason to feel pride in your cultural, read this book and see how you cold turn out if you have no pride in your culture
Rating: 
Summary: Makes some good points but boring as hell
Review: Indeed Richard makes some good points about bilingual education and affirmative action - and they ARE well worth noting (how affirmative action doesn't benefit those who need it the most)....but everything else about this book [is bad]. His writing style is very self-absorbed. His opinions are inserted after just about EVERY comment and EVERY action ANYONE (his family or the outside world) commits, it's like he's trying to beat his own opinion into your head. There's also very stuck-up tone lurking under his writing; he VERY often notes his own accomplishments endlessly (...at a cocktail party in Bel Air...entered high school having read 100s of books...), it's all fabulous but reading about his greatness gets very tedious after awhile (especially when he's describing how he started making lists of books he read...that alone is 6 pages - go look yourself: p.59-64. Many advocates of this book say that they like it because of how he becomes "aware of his assimilation" and "recognizes that with all gain comes some loss." Well, unfortunetely, even though Ricahrd becomes AWARE and RECOGNIZES all these things - he lets everyone know he knows by portraying himself as a suffering hero and a "cosmic victim." By saying he's a "cosmic victim" implies some divinity "choose" him to suffer - as if! He chose to separate himself from his family the minute he decided he repected his teachers more. And yes, Mr. Rodriguez dedicated his book to his parents - but it's funny how he wrote "For him and her-to honor them." To me, if he hadn't written the "to honor them", I would have though he was writing this book as almsot a cruel parody of them - of what they never could be anything else but what they already were in his world, that they are not as great as he because of their lack of education. Overall, this book is nothing remarkable, if not very boring. Read for an opinion of affirmative action and biligual education (but ignore the fact HE frequently benefited from both, even he admits that!). Yes, he is educated, intelligent, and perhaps (I wouldn't know) a "provocative speaker"....but his image at the end is not of a strong, modest, "manly" man, but a pathetic figure of a person who wants to comfort himself in the glory of his accomplishments. The overall taste you walk away with this book is not respect for Richard Rodriguez, but pity.
Rating:
Summary: I feel justified in my actions
Review: This book was the worst piece of garbage I have ever had the misfortune to read. I cut it in half and threw it away after reading it to make sure nobody else in my house stumbled across it and started to read it.
Rating:
Summary: open your eyes to the experiences of other Americans
Review: a great insight into what it was like to grow up Mexican American in California before it was "cool" to be of other ethnic Richard Rodriguez is a guest on the pbs news show, the Newshour. It will certainly make you think about how certain groups are treated in America and how that still goes on today. His life as a boy was interesting and then in later books he writes about being a gay Mexican American and being a person of color-the color Brown. Inspirational to anyone especially those of mixed heritages.
|
