"Hunger of Memory : The Education of Richard Rodriguez" by Richard Rodriguez

I return to this book 8 years after I read if for the first time. Within minutes I find myself recalling the Sunday brunches my parents used to prepare for our entire family, the joyful sounds of my growing up in Virginia, after spending my early years in Eastern Europe. I intimately know the things Mr. Rodriguez writes about, because I’ve experienced them.

The book itself is an abstract approach to the original structure of an autobiography. It lacks the voluminous accounts of monthly or yearly accomplishments (Colin Powell ‘My American Journey’ or Bill Clinton’s ‘My Life’ come to mind). Rather, the author takes on a path of moral reflection on the time it took one boy to become a man and the education it took to transform one’s identity. He assembles a combination of essays through which via a free flowing narrative, he conducts self-examination over the emergence of his ‘public’ character and the replacement of his ‘private’ persona.

But there is something else in this book. There is longing. Longing for the days when the ’sounds’ of his family brought meaning and recognition for what he was meant to be, for where he was meant to go (or was that a childhood illusion?). A reader would find it difficult to ignore the author’s emotional yearning for the past for a childhood now gone, when love, and family, and values, and identity made sense.

Mr. Rodriguez has done a superb job of capturing with words what many of us (first or second generation Americans) feel as members of families with similar backgrounds.
I highly recommend this book.

-by Simon Cleveland