Melding memoir with cultural criticism, Richard T. Rodriguez examines the relationship between British post-punk musicians like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam Ant, and Pet Shop Boys and their Latinx audiences in the United States since the 1980s.
Richard Rodriguez Books
Richard Rodríguez is an American writer whose work delves into the intricate interplay of identity, language, and education. His writing explores the complex relationships between personal experience and societal forces, offering profound insights into the process of self-discovery. Rodríguez's literary style is marked by its introspective elegance and its ability to illuminate universal human themes through the lens of personal narrative.
Hunger of Memory
- 200 pages
- 7 hours of reading
"Forty years ago, readers met the extraordinary writer Richard Rodriguez through the story of his own education. He would go on to win a loyal readership with Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Brown: The Last Discovery of America, and Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography. But first came Hunger of Memory, originally published by Godine in 1982. Hunger of Memory is the story of a young Mexican-American, who began school in Sacramento, California knowing just fifty words of English, yet concluded his university studies in the reading room of the British Museum. In between, he fought a dramatic struggle between his public and private self. A longtime resident of San Francisco, and an ardent opponent of easy labels and limited self-conceptions, Rodriguez describes himself as a "queer Catholic Indian Spaniard at home in a temperate Chinese city in a fading blond state in a post-Protestant nation." Resisting the easy way of following received dogmatic and conventional thought, Rodriguez has also encountered hostility for his provocative positions on issues such as affirmative action and bilingual education. But the extraordinary clarity of his iconoclastic writing--the surprising twists in his thinking, the view of public policy as it limits individual lives, and the story he tells of an American education--have made this book endure for forty years and counting. This edition includes a new afterword by the author as well as an introduction by Phillip Lopate. Whether you're hearing about Richard Rodriguez for the first time, or have read him for years, whether his life is like your own or far from it, if you care about the power of language and original thinking, you owe yourself to read Hunger of Memory."--Amazon.com