| Family Sentence: The Search for My Cuban-Revolutionary, Prison-Yard, Mythic-Hero, Deadbeat Dad Contributor(s): Cornillot, Jeanine (Author) |
|
 |
ISBN: 0807006173 ISBN-13: 9780807006177 Publisher: Beacon Press OUR PRICE: $14.40 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: September 2010 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs - Family & Relationships - Social Science | Ethnic Studies - Hispanic American Studies |
| Dewey: B |
| Physical Information: 0.7" H x 5.44" W x 8.22" (0.66 lbs) 240 pages |
| Themes: - Topical - Family - Ethnic Orientation - Hispanic - Sex & Gender - Feminine - Cultural Region - Mid-Atlantic - Geographic Orientation - Pennsylvania - Locality - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Jeanine Cornillot was just two years old when her father, a former Cuban revolutionary turned anti-Castro militant, was sentenced to thirty years in a Florida prison for political bombings. His absence left a single mother to raise four children who kept his incarceration a secret and conjured a mythic father-hero out of his occasional letters. Jeanine's Irish American mother struggled to support the family in suburban Philadelphia. Summers, she put Jeanine on a plane to Little Havana, where she lived with her Spanish-speaking grandparents and bilingual cousin--a sometimes unreliable translator. It was there in Florida that she met her father face to face, in the prison yards. As Cornillot travels between these two worlds, a wryly funny and unsentimental narrator emerges. Whether meeting her father for the first time at age six and hoping she looks Cuban enough, imagining herself a girl-revolutionary leading protest marches, dreamily planning her father's homecoming after his prison break, or writing to demand an end to his forty-four-day hunger strike after he's recaptured, young Jeanine maintains a hopeful pragmatism that belies her age. Eventually, a child's mythology is replaced with an adult's reality in a final reckoning with her father, remarkable for the unsparing honesty on both sides. |