Overview

Enough with the dead white men! The true story of the United States lies with its most overlooked and marginalized peoples--the workers, immigrants, housewives, and slaves who built America from the ground up, and who made this country what it is today. In A Most Imperfect Union, cultural critic Ilan Stavans and award-winning cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz present a vibrant history of these unsung Americans. In an irreverent, fast-paced narrative that challenges the conventional narrative of American history, Stavans and Alcaraz offer a fresh, controversial take on the philosophies, products, practices, and people--from Algonquin and African royals to early feminists, Puerto Rican radicals, and Arab immigrants--that have made America such an outsized and extraordinary land.

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9781322549064

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Reviews

In A Most Imperfect Union: A Contrarian History of the United States, Ilan Stavans and Lalo Alcaraz strip away the pen-and-inks of popular history in an extended comic strip that presents the highs and lows, ins and outs, established and too easily missed truths of our American story. With wit, irony and a snappy parade of different perspectives, the book allows us to poke fun at ourselves even as we grapple with the deeper implications of our culture of 'creative destruction.' --Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University Well then, by God, we have a history here that's not the usual one--that is, the mainstream, blue-eyed history we're usually force-fed. A Most Imperfect Union provides a sobering look at (if not a sometimes absolutely gut-busting, humorous portrayal of) American history. This book is great and should be carried in the back pocket of every school kid--not the in the backpack but in the pocket, where it can be retrieved on impulse and read and reread for joy, pleasure, and accurate information about how we came to be who we are in this country: gracious and generous, yet selfish and mean-spirited; awesomely truthful and helpful and neighborly, yet sometimes meagerly erecting borders and fences where none should exist. Alas, something to really enjoy. --Jimmy Santiago Baca, poet, and author of Singing at the Gates True patriotism consists in wanting to make your country better, not in pretending that it is already perfect. In A Most Imperfect Union, Ilan Stavans and Lalo Alcaraz provide a warts-and-all take on U.S history--witty and pithy, creative and critical, subversive and constructive. By scanning the countrys virtues and vices in a single sweep, they will make readers love for America better informed; the book may also help to inspire young Americans to sustain the project of making the U.S. a model country in an increasingly plural hemisphere, an increasingly complex world

Author Information

Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. Lalo Alcaraz is a faculty member at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles, and the creator of the nationally syndicated comic strip, La Cucaracha. He lives in Whittier, California.

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