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Book of the Month Outside Links: Book Author Publisher
Additional Conversation Outside Links: Book Author Publisher
September 2014 Book of the Month
Take This Man: A Memoir
By Brando Skyhorse
Published by Simon & Schuster
ISBN-13: 978-1439170878
When he was three years old, Brando Kelly Ulloa was abandoned by his Mexican father. His mother, Maria, dreaming of a more exciting life, saw no reason for her son to live his life as a Mexican just because he started out as one. The life of “Brando Skyhorse,” the American Indian son of an incarcerated political activist, was about to begin.
Through a series of letters to Paul Skyhorse Johnson, a stranger in prison for armed robbery, Maria reinvents herself and her young son as American Indians in the colorful Mexican-American neighborhood of Echo Park, California. There Brando and his mother live with his acerbic grandmother and a rotating cast of surrogate fathers. It will be over thirty years before Brando begins to untangle the truth of his own past, when a surprise discovery online leads him to his biological father at last.
From an acclaimed, prize-winning novelist celebrated for his “indelible storytelling” (O, The Oprah Magazine), this extraordinary literary memoir captures a son’s single-minded search for a father wherever he can find one, and is destined to become a classic.
September 2014 Additional Conversation
Lavando La Dirty Laundry
By Natalia Treviño
Published by Mongrel Empire Stress
ISBN-13: 978-0985133757
As described by poet Wendy Barker, “the poems of Lavando la Dirty Laundry give us the stories of wives, from abuelas and tías in Mexico, figures from Greek epics and the New Testament, as well as from the contemporary narrator who speaks of the sourness of a former marriage and the sweet nourishment of a new one that joins two cultures from opposite sides of the globe.”
Sandra Cisneros, author of House on Mango Street and a MacArthur Fellow, praises Lavando la Dirty Laundry, saying, “It is on the white sheets of this book that a woman’s most private confessions are transformed from dirty laundry to poetry luminescent as linen on the line.”
National Book Award-winning poet Allison Adelle Hedge Coke declares, “Treviño solidly delivers in her debut presentation, an admirable poetic; a knowing we all need, must read.”
According to San Antonio poet laureate Carmen Tafolla, “This exquisite collection of poems enchants and exposes, drawing the reader into its center surely, passionately, and as fiercely as a wildfire.”
“These are not safe poems,” says New Mexico Centennial Poet Laureate Levi Romero, “They do not have a safety net or a forewarning and they recall what some would rather forget. They are lessons in the comfort and healing that comes through sharing and telling.”