Overview

A Pulitzer Prize Finalist Rodriguez's acclaimed first book, Hunger of Memory raised a fierce controversy with its views on bilingualism and alternative action. Now, in a series of intelligent and candid essays, Rodriguez ranges over five centuries to consider the moral and spiritual landscapes of Mexico and the US and their impact on his soul.

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9780140096224

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Reviews

"FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE ""In it's most powerful passages, Days of Obligation reveals the writer as a tightrope walker who balances pessimism and the defeat of predictable expectations against the discovery of the profoundly unanticipated."" - The New York Times ""Rodriguez's moral and aesthetic imagination guarantees that this beautiful book will linger long after the polemics in the culture wars subside. "" - Kirkus Reviews"

Ten years after his first book, Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez again threatens to redefine the way we think about ethnicity, education, and religion in present-day America. And he does so in disarmingly baroque prose - poetical, nuanced, and, at times, heroic. Rodriguez's essays are informed by his Latin skepticism and his firm belief in Original Sin and the limits of possibility. Hardly the typical posture for a cosmopolitan Californian who lives in sybaritic San Francisco in one of its Victorian doll houses for libertines. But then again, there's nothing typical about Rodriguez, whether he's meditating on the AIDS epidemic; musing on the legend of the notorious bandit Joaquin Murrieta; or mucking about the reconstructed missions in southern California. Rodriguez travels to Mexico, where, he says, the Indian suffers from Gitchigooism - the habit of placing him outside history, and of treating him as a mascot of the international ecology movement. Like the belligerent Chicano, the Mexican denies the power of miscegenation and assimilation. Rodriguez, on the other hand, understands the future of the West - of America itself - as a struggle between two traditions: the comedy of California, with its Protestant faith in individualism, played against the tragedy of Mexico, with its communal legacy of Catholicism. While his immigrant father clings to the sadness of the past, Rodriguez embraces contradiction. He seeks out order in the exuberant Protestant chaos; he embodies the conflict of theologies in his often ambivalent behavior. At the slightest hint of ideology, Rodriguez retreats into poetry and irony. His aloofness is worthy of Naipaul; his vision of America echoes Ralph Ellison; and his gimlet eye reminds us of Joan Didion - though he's the Catholic, middle-class postscript to her Protestant anomie. Rodriguez's moral and aesthetic imagination guarantees that this beautiful book will linger long after the polemics in the culture wars subside. Everywhere here, one is in the presence of a superior sensibility, all the more remarkable for its modest beginnings. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Richard Rodriguez- a master of the personal essay, has authored three books of intensely private memory woven with considerations of the great public issues of our time. He describesHunger of Memory,Days of Obligation,Brownas a trilogy on class, ethnicity, and race, respectively. His most recent book isDarling- A Spiritual Autobiography. Rodriquez's books have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award. His television essays on American life for The PBS NewsHour were recognized with a Peabody Award. He also has written and hosted documentaries on California and Mexico for U.S. and British television. He was a longtime contributor toHarper's Magazineand theLos Angeles Times. Rodriguez has lived most of his life in California.

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