Painful to Write, Painful to Read

Abstract

JL A. unger of Memory, no doubt a painful book to write, is no less painful to read. Years of private doubts, publicly expressed in Change (Sept. 1978) and elsewhere, have enabled Richard Rodriguez to craft an exceptional book exceptional for its carefully structured candor and its unconventionality. Yet, for all its surface logic and craftsmanship, Hunger of Memory fails to convince; for all its erudition, it fails to illumine. Despite Rodriguez's avowed anglicization, he has traded upon his ethnicity and disavowed those efforts made by many minorities to enter the academy. There is much sadness in this book, particularly in its unwitting depiction of the toll exacted from minority professionals. What is equally sad is the rush of majority professionals to embrace Rodriguez's message. The book's jacket, for instance, quotes Jonathan Kozol: He has said more that matters in 200 pages than most writers on 'bilingual education' have been able to get into 2,000. (Continued on page 42) First Learning Unchallenged and Untested