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The Boy Kings Of Texas: A Memoir (2012)

by Domingo Martinez(Favorite Author)

3.58 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0762779195 (ISBN13: 9780762779192)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Lyons Press

review 1: Extremely uneven, disappointing, bloated memoir. There's enough potentially interesting material that I can see how it could have made for a decent book, but clearly the editor was MIA on this one. I made it a third of the way through, hoping the author's stories would build to something, but his admissions of writing this while drunk and of not really remembering a lot, his completely inaccurate Spanish spelling ("bien paca" for "ven acá" and "lla" for "ya" stand out), and his self-aggrandizement made me distrust and dislike this author, and I had to give up. I did enjoy learning about his gramma's tamale-making tradition/scam, and the story about his sisters as "The Mimis" reveals writing chops that are absent in most of the rest of what I read. This should have been an... more early draft rather than a published book.
review 2: I picked this up after hearing Martinez read a portion of it for a segment on "This American Life." Martinez is a gifted storyteller, and portions of his memoir about growing up in south Texas are gripping. But I had two pretty big gripes with the book. The first was the way that Martinez seemed to blame Mexican culture in general for all of the negative aspects of his childhood family life, particularly his father's abusiveness, which Martinez portrays as typical Mexican machismo. I found this to be lazy, offensive, and offputting. Second, either Martinez never learned to write in Spanish, or there isn't a single editor on staff at Lyons Press who can write it. Accent marks are sprinkled in randomly whenever there is Spanish dialogue, and at least 30% of all the Spanish words in the book are spelled wrong. So distracting! less

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