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Summary: DUDE STOP PLAYING THE VICTIM!!!!!
Review: (...)Frankly, Mr. Rodriguez is trying to make the reader feel sorry for him. His writing tone is very condescending. What's funny is that in the introduction he describes his book as having "fuguelike repetition." I couldn't describe it better myself! This book just goes on and on and on and on and on...It's one of the worst books I've ever read in my entire life. What an unhappy guy. He makes his life sound so miserable. (...) This book is really depressing. I felt guilty for being a minority after reading it. Well if you're looking for some good reading this isn't it. I personally reccomend "Snow Falling on Cedars" or "A Walk to Remember".
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Summary: Full of Yawns and Dismay!
Review: This is one of the worse books that I have read. Mr. Rodriguez may be intelligent but he has lost touch with reality and what life is all about. I got the impression that he feels that all Latinos should be at his intellectual level. If they are not he would prefer not to associate himself with them. Mr. Rodriguez doesn't know who he is nor what he wants with life. There are many intellectual Latinos that successfully live Bi-Cultural lives here in America. It's not just isolated to Latinos either. After all thats what makes up America. Mr. Rodriquez sounds like a big cry baby and just wants pity for what he has gone through. Wake up Mr. Rodriguez, you're not the only one. Others have gone through what you have but yet they have no reason to complain nor shun their culture as you have. After I read this book I was anxious to find out who else read it or know about him. I came across some individuals who happened to be around Mr. Rodriguez's age and have received their education around his time. Most have seen him speak in person and some have even met him. They all pretty much told me that "MR. RICHARD RODRIGUEZ IS FULL OF HIMSELF AND WHAT HE BELIEVES IN. HE'S IN COMPLETE DENIAL." DON'T BUY THIS BOOK. THERE ARE BETTER ONES OUT THERE. FYI: Mr. Rodriguez is currently a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times.
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Summary: Waste of time
Review: I never read a book I despised, until now. This book is boring, redundant, and pointless. Rodriguez tries to make the reader feel sorry for him. At the same time he is acting as if he is the most spectacular thing living. I hope he somehow finds this review, because I wasted I good deal of time struggling thorugh his book.
Rating:
Summary: Most boring book ever
Review: This book was extremely useless. Richard Rodriguez goes on and on and on about the same things through the whole book. I have no idea why my english teacher made us read this book. This is not an autobiography at all. There is a lot of his life missing from this book. You shouldn't buy this book unless you have to read it for some class.
Rating: 
Summary: A Genuine Education
Review: Richard Rodriguez has written a fascinating, truthful, and, for our age, "offensive" autobiography. Not surprisingly, as he points out, he's been widely misunderstood. Championed on the one hand by complacent Right Wingers, he's been rejected on the other by assorted mindless members of the Ethnic Left. The source of this misunderstanding may well be Rodriguez' theory of actual, as opposed to nominal, education. It bears a striking resemblance to Plato's in the "Allegory of the Cave." No matter what one's social or ethnic background, real education will involve a painful wrenching free of the student from such accidents of birth. As Rodriguez makes clear, this process involves losses as well as gains, but only in this way can the student come to broader and deeper insights into the genuinely true, good and beautiful. No snob, Rodriguez dedicates his book to his parents, while he recognizes he's been dragged kicking ans screaming up and out of a Cave, and they never will be. Like a freed prisoner who's seen the light, he returns to give speeches in Cave society, largely to be misunderstood, even mocked. Educated, he finds himself a mutilated man; his gain is superior insight. Rodriguez provides an antidote to that shopworn fashion of our age, education in the Cave, for the Cave, and by the Cave.
Rating:
Summary: Burn this Book and Piss on the Ashes
Review: This book doesn't even deserve one star. This was quite possibly the most anticlimactic, redundant, rediculously verbose, and dull book I have ever come in contact with. Richard Rodriguez completely leaves out entire chunks of his life, which are probably the most interesting parts. If the parts of his life he put in the book are the most interesting, I feel sorry for the poor man for not having anything more enrapturing to write about than why he was a "scholarship boy" or whatever the hell it is. He is obsessed about labeling and overanalyzing the littlest things in life like, "why did she pass me the salt with her left hand...am I not good enough for the right? Or perhaps she is left handed, perhaps she has minor arthritus in her right hand. I think I should go more in depth on the causes of arthritus. Yes, I will." Dammit man, shut up. Just get on with it. There's nothing exciting, interesting, sexy, or even mildly intellectually stimulating in this book except for trying to figure out why the hell he wrote this: "Richard (how do you do?) Rodriguez" in the middle of a thought. Yes, I finished the book, and was entirely consumed by the worthlessness of it all.
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Summary: Why this book is not worth the price
Review: This book has got to be one of the most random books I have ever read. Maybe you would enjoy this book if you are going into a new world but otherwise do yourself the favor and don't pay for this book! The thoughts are some of the most random books ever. DON'T BUY THIS!
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Summary: Intimacy through language
Review: Rodriguez writes about the intimacy of the native tongue. The Spanish language allows him to express thoughts and feelings in ways that the Enlgish language cannot. My feelings are similar when speaking to my parents and grandparents. This book changed my outlook on culture and language and the interplay between the two. I have focused on maintaining tradition that I once saw as unnecessary. I am once again buying this book to keep on my shelves to read and re-read again and again......
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Summary: I had similar experiences
Review: I'm also Mexican-American and went through similar experiences as the author of this book. I was also the only Mexican student in my classroom at the elementary school that I attended all 8 years.
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Summary: Powerful and deeply moving.
Review: Vance Packard, in researching his book "The Status Seekers," found that upward mobility in the United States was much more difficult than Americans would like to believe, and that those who were successful made it largely by cutting ties to their roots. Although framed in the context of ethnicity--Richard Rodriguez' book makes that same point. Moving up from working class to upper middle class promised success and acceptance and self-respect, but getting there was a little like edging out onto the ice, feeling inadequate and fearful that at any moment he might fall through. This book will resonate with anyone--immigrant or not, minority or not--who has made such a journey. Rodriguez scathingly criticizes affirmative action and bi-lingual education programs, correctly identifying the first as promoting socially crippling labels--"disadvantaged minority"--and the second as an obstacle to what he sees as the keys to success in America--a solid education and learning to speak and write English well. Rodriguez discovers early on what many of those with romantic notions about their ethnic or racial heritage eventually come to realize--that he is an American. But in the sadness he feels at the growing distance between himself and his parents, he fails--and several previous reviewers of this book fail--to note one very important thing. Upward mobility occurs incrementally, not in one leap. Rodriguez was put in a position to get that excellent education, to learn to speak unaccented English, and to become a respected author and scholar by parents who left Mexico and the little homogeneous Catholic towns and moved to the United States. In short, by parents who had cut the ties to their own roots.
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