|
 |
Overseas
American
Growing Up Gringo in the Tropics
By
Gene
H. Bell-Villada
Published
University Press of Mississippi |
|
A troubling memoir explores what it
means to be an American abroad Born in 1941 of a white father and
a Hawaiian mother, Gene H. Bell-Villada grew up an overseas
American citizen. An outsider wherever he landed, he never had
a ready answer to the innocuous question "Where are you
from?"
By the time Bell-Villada was a teenager, he had lived in Puerto Rico, Venezuela,
and Cuba. Though English was his first language, his claim on
U.S. citizenship was a hollow one. All he knew of his purported homeland
was gleaned from imported comic books and movies. He spoke Spanish
fluently, but he never fully fit into the culture of the Latin American
countries where he grew up.
In childhood, he attended an American Catholic school for Puerto Ricans
in San Juan, longing all the while to convert from Episcopalianism
so that he could better fit in. Later at a Cuban military school,
during the height of the Batista dictatorship, he witnessed fervent
political debates among the cadets about Fidel Castro’s
nascent revolution and U.S. foreign policy. His times at the American
School in Caracas, Venezuela, are tinged with reminiscences of
oil booms and fights between U.S. and Venezuelan teen gangs.
When Bell-Villada finally comes to the United States to stay, he finds
himself just as rootless as before, moving from New Mexico to Arizona
to California to Massachusetts in quick succession. His accounts
of life on the campuses of Berkeley and Harvard, during the tumultuous
1960s, reveal much about the country’s climate during the Cold
War era.
Eventually the "Gringo" comes home, finding the stability
in his marriage and career that allows him to work through and
proudly claim his identity as a "global nomad." Gene
H. Bell-Villada, Cambridge, Massachusetts, is chair of the department
of Romance Languages at Williams College and the author of such
books as Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art, The Pianist
Who Liked Ayn Rand, and the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Art
for Art’s Sake & Literary Life: How Politics & Markets Helped
Shape the Ideology and Culture of Aestheticism, 1790-1990.
This
website: Copyright © 2005 Dream
World Media, LLC. / Urban Mozaik Magazine. All rights reserved.
The opinions expressed in Urban Mozaik Magazine are not necessarily
those of Urban Mozaik Magazine and the publisher cannot be held responsible
for them. This website/publication, in whole or in part, may not be
reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
|
|
 |
|
IWho’s
Afraid of a Large Black Man?
By
Charles Barkley
Editor/introduction: Michael Wilbon
Published
by Penguin Group (USA)
|
|
From
the inimitable Charles Barkley, author of The New York Times best-selling
I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It, comes a frank, fearless, funny, and explosive
look at the reality of race and racism in America today.
The thing about race, Charles Barkley says, is we talk about it only
when something bad happens and tempers are high, and so all we do is
shout at one another across a chasm that's wide and getting wider. The
rest of the time we try to pretend that the chasm isn't there. The way
to get real about things, Barkley demonstrates in this book, isn't to
shout and point fingers, but to expose all the hypocrisy and phoniness
that keep us from talking about the way things really are, and even
to find the humor in all the crazy disconnects and misunderstandings
between the different races in America. It's time someone did, because
things aren't getting better, as he's here to show us. Racism has just
gone underground: Sure, celebrities like him get the white-glove treatment,
but in the meantime, we're living in a country that's growing steadily
more racially segregated. If you're white, what are the odds you live
or work with a significant number of black people? The odds are low
and getting lower. When news of the Kobe Bryant case broke, 70 percent
of whites polled thought he did it; 70 percent of blacks polled thought
he was innocent. What's that about?, Charles Barkley wants to
know. Until we learn to see into one another's minds and hearts a little
more and, crucially, to laugh with one another, we're just going to
keep living the lie that racism has gone away just because it's out
of plain sight.
Who's Afraid of a Large Black Man? is part rant, part personal story,
and part investigation: Barkley sounds off on a wonderful range of issues
relating to the subject, from interracial love to affirmative action
to real estate to racial stereotypes, and he relates personal stories
from his own life experience. He also goes across America to see for
himself where the country is with race, talking to students in Ann Arbor
about affirmative action, sitting down with the Grand Dragon of the
Alabama KKK, and drawing in many other famous Americans to talk about
race in their own lives and lines of work.
Frank, funny as hell, explosive—everything we feel we can't say
but it really is high time we did. Only Charles Barkley, and thank heaven
for him.
About the author:
Charles Barkley is a studio analyst for TNT's Inside the NBA¸
a regular contributor to CNN's TalkBack Live, and a frequent color commentator.
Named one of the fifty greatest NBA players of all time, he was selected
to eleven All-Star teams and won the NBA's MVP in 1993.
About the editor:
Michael Wilbon is a Washington Post sports columnist and the co-host,
with Tony Hornheiser, of the ESPN show Pardon the Interruption.
|
|
