KQED Public Radio's Forum presents California Reading, a radio book club featuring fiction about California and by California authors. Each month, listeners are invited to read a selected book and share their thoughts online and during a special hour of Forum.
May 2004 Book
Selection: Hunger Of Memory
by Richard Rodriguez
From the publisher:
"Hunger of Memory" is the story of Mexican-American Richard
Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California,
knowing just 50 words of English, and concludes his university
studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British
Museum. It is the journey of a "minority student" who pays the
cost of his social assimilation and academic success with a
painful alienation -- from his past, his parents, his culture
-- and so describes the high price of "making it" in middle-class
America.
About the author:
Richard Rodriguez is an editor at Pacific News Service, and a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, and the Sunday Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times. Rodriguez's awards for "Hunger of Memory" include the The Christopher Prize for Autobiography; The Gold Metal for Non-Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California, and the Anisfeld-Wolf Prize for Civil Rights. He was awarded the Frankel Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the International Journalism Award from the World Affairs Council of California. Rodriguez's autobiographical trilology about American public life includes "Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Father" (1992) and "Brown: The Last Discovery of America" (2002). Rodriguez lives in San Francisco.
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