5 comments about Gringa Latina: A Woman of Two Worlds.

1. This book beautifuly describes the life of a woman embodying two different cultures.



2. I really enjoyed this book. She did such a wonderful job describing Peru and the complexity of her feelings being a "Latina" based on geographic reasons, and "Gringa" according to her ethnicity. I also found it interesting how she was perceived when in America. Reading this book also made me want to see Peru and all it's beauty.



3. In Gringa Latina we have a character that his not Peruvian or Hispanic because her family comes from Italy, when she leaves Peru and comes to the states she is a latina because she in not American, and so it goes that she is never fully at home in either culture or though we get a brilliant portrayal of her youth in the South American continent. Excellent book.



4. (comment dated June 23rd, 2005)
   Really, I coudn't stop reading it from the beginning to the end. I was raised in several towns and villages in Peru, and wound up finishing high school in a Jesuit School in Tacna, ran by this "jesuit priest" de Ferrari mentions in a small passage of this book. The book is a delicious reminiscence of the years passed by the author in this small and heroic village in the southern end of Peru, causing a strong wind of nostalgy in those like me who know the town and its wonderful people. I will start talking about some mistakes in the book. In my opinion, she is feeling "too" strange to the people of Tacna. I really don't think so. Even though her parents were Italian, Tacna was populated by many European colonies, all of them outnumbered by the Italian colony, which, even in my times (the 70's), was still composed of several thousand people, including Italians and their descendants, like her. Many of the current most important names in Tacna are still Italians, and tho there has been a social turn in the last 20 years, the Italian immigration to Tacna and Arica in the XIX century (then a part of Peru) is a passage of our history rarely studied.
   There are some other mistakes in the book, which being a non-fiction book is something I can not help pointing out. The Inca Empire extended from Colombia to the north of Argentina, and de Ferrari claims it extended from north of Venezuela to the Patagonia in the south of Argentina. Hummm. Huge mistake for a girl who was educated in Colegio Santa Ana, the Italian private School of Tacna. A few other historical misunderstandings spot here and there along the book. Her point of view about the birth of the Shining Path is also a common place, but that popular theory (that the Shining Path was some sort of indigenous rebellion) was later discovered untrue, being the SP a urban movement leaded by urban and well educated college teachers who belonged to the "white" class from Ayacucho and other Sierra cities.
   But, in general, I enjoyed a lot reading the description of the places and especially about the food, which seems an obsession for this woman, congratulations, she really is a gourmet. I am a passionate for those territories and especially for those people, who, like the de Ferrari's, I think compose the best group of people living in a so disfunctional country like mine. The peruvian peoples from Tacna, Arica, and Tarapaca suffered a severe loss in the 1880's when they were forced to change their nationality, but across the border, many ancient families still prevail, keeping a bright peruvian light in their hearts. This is especially true regarding the Italian families, many of whom hold repeated names on both sides of the current border, keeping contact with relatives and families.
   I still have to read "A Cloud on Sand", but I presume this fiction book must be based in de Ferrari's life in Tacna as a teenager.
   Congratulations Gabriella, I still wonder how many of your "paisanos" have read your book, and if it wouldn't be necessary to transate it into Spanish. Anyway, I will take a copy of your book to Father Fred (the Jesuit priest) so he can enjoy the book too.
   
   (Updated Feb 16, 2006)
   I already did, I took a copy of the book to Father Fred, who was happy to have it, and claimed to have recently seen Gabriella upon her mother's pass away.



5. I liked Armando's comment about the huge historical mistakes made by someone who attended the Santa Ana private school. I guess he is right considering we used to have history class every year since the 6th. grade. I suppose Cristo Rey (the Jesuit school he talks about) always had a better curricula for their students!
   Back to the book, I guess it is very tough to write about our memories from Tacna or even Peru in general, when this country seems to take away part of our objectivity in just a matter of months. We tend to remember good things as being "great" and bad things as "really bad" perhaps. Tacna is certainly a small city but I have never thought of it as a "village". Perhaps we still don't have a Mc Donald's or a BK there, but that doesn't mean anything really. Although "drugs and fear" have always been present, I highly doubt that they would have made such a great difference during the years the author lived there. Yes, perhaps we continue to fill the news every day with stories about murder, corruption and rape, but that's just what we care to show to the world. I lived in Tacna until 1999, part of one of these Italian families who migrated over there and enjoyed the privileges of having money and building a reputation that now is almost vanished. I won't deny that I tell stories about Tacna all the time, in some cases; these stories are even phrased similarly as to the ones in the book. They excite people. Still, I believe it is mostly because our lack of open minds and the way we managed to carry traditions from one generation to the other. This is the greatest mystery of all I think; we can only see it as such and relate it in such a magical way after going through the major change of leaving that city.

No comments about Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician and Racial Theorist (Southern Biography Series).

2 comments about Taxi from Hell: Confessions of a Russian Hack.

1. I've read this book in Russian (Russian version is called "Yellow Kings"), and now eager to read it in English. Book is very interesting and author's style is perfect. And, more important - book describes real life, with it humorous and sad moments. I'm Russian and when I first went to NYC - I saw the city the same "way" as the author did...



2. This is a true view behind the yellow curtain of the taxi staging lot at any major airport in the states. And how owners and drivers interact.

No comments about Jessie Bernard: The Making of a Feminist.

No comments about Emile Durkheim: Critical Assessments III (Critical Assessments).

1 comments about Beyond the Wall.

1. Exellent book about one woman's life experiences. I received this book from E.S. signed and read it straight through. I don't get to visit her much anymore and whenever I feel I need her I open the book and she is there to talk me through anything. It's like having a real good friend who's had an extraordinary life and can tell you everything open and honestly. I recommend it to everyone.

No comments about Kimball Young on Sociology in Transition, 1912-1968.

No comments about Alain Touraine (Consensus and Controversy Falmer Sociology Series).

2 comments about Adorno: A Political Biography.

1. Although an authoritative intellectual biography of Adorno is needed, this book doesn't fill the gap. Despite the sub-title, the author ranges freely across Adorno's work in philosophy, sociology, aesthetics, music and literature, and just over two hundred pages (of main text) is not enough space to deal adequately with the material, let alone with the additional portraits of associates such as Horkheimer and Kracauer. Some of Adorno's major works, such as Negative Dialectics, receive cursory treatment, and either the author, or possibly the translator, is not comfortable with technical philosophical arguments. Some discussions of Heidegger's views, for example, are nonsensical.
   
   This has the appearance of a hasty piece of work, and as one reads on, the impression grows that the author has little respect for his subject. As a person and thinker, Adorno was surely flawed, but his story deserves a more balanced, detailed and informed recounting.



2. Jaeger's book ends with the claim that "by the time that Adorno died in August 1969, the normative potential of his theory was already exhausted," and that "the abstractions of exchange and money [had become] the ideology of a world without symbols, of a universality without culture." There is no recognition that this would imply the continuing 'normative potential' of Adorno's thought. This book is littered with similar mis-steps. Jaeger attacks Adorno's use of psychoanalysis as a critical tool, hut he himself traces Adorno's theory of the relationship between language and music to "an overwhelming sense of gratitude to his mother's voice." How could anyone write a biography on Adorno which fails to reflect on itself to this degree?
   Internal inconsistencies aside, there are problems of content. For no apparent reason, Jaeger stages Adorno's thinking as a clash between Athens and Jerusalem (although the entirely gratuitous mention of Leo Strauss might hint at an esoteric reading of the present book). Jaeger returns again and again to Jewishness, but always other peoples' Jewishness: Horkheimer, Celan... why all this in a book on Adorno? Well, Jaeger has a clear dislike for him. So Adorno - not Jewish enough, too anti-capitalist, too utopian - is often absent. This dislike is in turn understandable, since he is clearly incapable of understanding Adorno's ideas: see, for instance, the section on Heidegger and 'The Jargon of Authenticity'; or Jaeger's 'interpretation' of the Frankfurt School's sociology as a vision of society as "a kind of tabula rasa: people in it live without traditions, without religion, without nations and without a state." Bizarrely, two pages are given over to Ralf Dahrendorf's complaints about the Institute for Social Research, before we learn that Dahrendorf spent barely a month there.
   "Today's reader [of Minima Morali] may be struck not only by the lack of genuine observations on America but may gain only an inadequate idea of the author's empirical existence [sic]: but if Adorno had been identical with the 'implied author' he would no doubt have been prevented from writing the book by sheer unhappiness."
   Like the above sentence, this book is grammatically flawed, rhetorically atrocious (what exactly is a 'genuine observation'? Is it to be distinguished from an ungenuine one?), and showcases a total lack of understanding of its subject. Finally, it is self-absorbed. Jaeger's apparent desire to justify post-modern capitalism crushes any possibility of objective judgement.
   For all that, if read as a collection of portraits (of, amongst others, Kracauer, Horkheimer, Mann and Fromm) it's a nice way to pass a winter afternoon. But don't pay full price.

1 comments about Chicago Days / Hoboken Nights.

1. Daniel Pinkwater is noteworthy in many respects, but what fascinates me most is the way in which he manages to be brilliant, moving, and profound without ever accentuating the negative. This autobiographical collection of brief, bite-size narratives (perfect for bedtime, the bathroom, or the ten-minute break at work) chronicles Pinkwater's development as an artist/writer, and gives the reader the opportunity to enjoy the world through the eyes of a funny, intelligent man who truly loves life. This is a non-fiction, non-children's book by a children's author.