Enrique's Journey
Author: Sonia Nazario
In this astonishing true story, award-winning journalist Sonia Nazario recounts the unforgettable odyssey of a Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States.
When Enrique is five years old, his mother, Lourdes, too poor to feed her children, leaves Honduras to work in the United States. The move allows her to send money back home to Enrique so he can eat better and go to school past the third grade.
Lourdes promises Enrique she will return quickly. But she struggles in America. Years pass. He begs for his mother to come back. Without her, he becomes lonely and troubled. When she calls, Lourdes tells him to be patient. Enrique despairs of ever seeing her again. After eleven years apart, he decides he will go find her.
Enrique sets off alone from Tegucigalpa, with little more than a slip of paper bearing his mother’s North Carolina telephone number. Without money, he will make the dangerous and illegal trek up the length of Mexico the only way he can–clinging to the sides and tops of freight trains.
With gritty determination and a deep longing to be by his mother’s side, Enrique travels through hostile, unknown worlds. Each step of the way through Mexico, he and other migrants, many of them children, are hunted like animals. Gangsters control the tops of the trains. Bandits rob and kill migrants up and down the tracks. Corrupt cops all along the route are out to fleece and deport them. To evade Mexican police and immigration authorities, they must jump onto and off the moving boxcars they call El Tren de la Muerte–The Train of Death. Enrique pushes forward using his wit, courage, and hope–andthe kindness of strangers. It is an epic journey, one thousands of immigrant children make each year to find their mothers in the United States.
Based on the Los Angeles Times newspaper series that won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for feature writing and another for feature photography, Enrique’s Journey is the timeless story of families torn apart, the yearning to be together again, and a boy who will risk his life to find the mother he loves.
The Washington Post - Luis Alberto Urrea
Joseph Campbell would recognize Enrique's Journey . It's the stuff of myth. A lone child embarks on a terrible journey through a landscape of monsters and villains. His goal is noble, almost chivalric -- he travels through hardship and dangers to find his mother, lost in the far mysteries of the north. To add another layer to the story, it contains a vehicle right out of a fairy tale: a Fury-haunted freight train known as El Tren de la Muerte -- the Train of Death.
Publishers Weekly
Soon to be turned into an HBO dramatic series, Nazario's account of a 17-year-old boy's harrowing attempt to find his mother in America won two Pulitzer Prizes when it first came out in the Los Angeles Times. Greatly expanded with fresh research, the story also makes a gripping book, one that viscerally conveys the experience of illegal immigration from Central America. Enrique's mother, Lourdes, left him in Honduras when he was five years old because she could barely afford to feed him and his sister, much less send them to school. Her plan was to sneak into the United States for a few years, work hard, send and save money, then move back to Honduras to be with her children. But 12 years later, she was still living in the U.S. and wiring money home. That's when Enrique became one of the thousands of children and teens who try to enter the U.S. illegally each year. Riding on the tops of freight trains through Mexico, these young migrants are preyed upon by gangsters and corrupt government officials. Many of them are mutilated by the journey; some go crazy. The breadth and depth of Nazario's research into this phenomenon is astounding, and she has crafted her findings into a story that is at once moving and polemical. Photos not seen by PW. (Feb. 28) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
One million people enter the United States legally each year, and another 700,000 arrive illegally, according to Nazario (Los Angeles Times), who won the Pulitzer Prize for her newspaper story on which this book is based. Here, she retraces the travel of immigrants from Central America to El Norte and writes brilliantly about the trials and tribulations that besiege the journey. Specifically, she focuses on a Honduran boy, Enrique, left behind by his mother, Lourdes, who fled to the United States, like many Central American women before her, to make enough money to give her children a better life back home and ultimately return to them. Although such women believe that they have made the right decision and that their time away will be brief, this often is not the case. Enrique is emblematic of many lonely children, feeling abandoned and missing their mothers, who decide to seek a reunion by traveling north through Mexico and, illegally, into the United States. They risk assault, robbery, rape, and even murder in the process. Sadly, the reunions between mothers and children-who felt abandoned-deteriorate to blame and resentment. Enrique's Journey is insightful and beautifully written and sheds a great deal of light on the horrific journeys immigrants risk to find a better life. Highly recommended for all libraries.-Tim Delaney, SUNY at Oswego Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Seeking to understand why Latina single mothers leave their children to come to the U.S., and why many children undertake the hazardous journey to reunite with them, Nazario traced one family's story. Enrique was determined to find his mother, who left him in Honduras when he was five. At 16, after seven attempts to make it to Texas, robbed by bandits or police, beaten, jailed, and deported again and again, he finally reached the Rio Grande and earned enough to call her. She sent him money to pay a "coyote" to smuggle him across the border and the two were reunited, but they are strangers now, their relationship strained. Meanwhile, Enrique's girlfriend in Honduras bore his child. Ultimately, she joined him, leaving their three-year-old daughter behind. Mothers leave their children to send back money for better food, clothing, and schooling, yet years of separation strain family ties. The author retraced Enrique's journey by traveling on top of trains, hitchhiking, taking buses, facing the dangers the teen faced. Photographs and interviews with him, family members, other children, and those who provide aid along the way document the hazards of migration. Descriptions of rapes, beatings, and jailing of immigrant children and accounts of those who suffered loss of limbs falling from freight trains are graphic and disturbing. But no one can doubt the authenticity of this reporting.-Molly Connally, Chantilly Regional Library, Fairfax County, VA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An expanded version of Nazario's Pulitzer Prize-winning articles, originally published in the Los Angeles Times, about the harrowing journey hopeful immigrants take from Central America through Mexico into the U.S. The twist on this familiar story is that in recent years, a growing number of America's illegal immigrants are women. Unable to feed and clothe their children, they leave their homes in Honduras or Guatemala and head for a better life in el Norte. Once in America, Mami sends back as much money as she possibly can and promises to return to her children as soon as she builds up a nest egg. But low-paying jobs as nannies or maids don't allow the women to save much, so immigrant mothers don't return home for years, if ever. Their children, too young to understand the heartbreaking calculus of economics and maternal self-sacrifice, feel abandoned. Some of them eventually undertake the pilgrimage through Mexico and across the border, hoping to reunite with their mothers. Nazario's account focuses on Enrique, left in Honduras by his mother Lourdes when he was six. Eleven years later, he decides it is time to find her. He must avoid immigration offices, who would send him back home, and the gangsters who regularly steal from, rape and even murder migrants. Enrique risks his life, riding through Mexico on the roofs of what child migrants call El Tren de la Muerte (the Train of Death). Enrique makes it to North Carolina, but he and Lourdes are in for an emotional shock. During the long years of separation, mother and son have idealized one another; their reunion exposes resentments that have festered over the years. This portrait of poverty and family ties has the potential to reshapeAmerican conversations about immigration.
Book about: Generation Digital or Applied Codeology
The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
Author: Barack Obama
“A government that truly represents these Americans–that truly serves these Americans–will require a different kind of politics. That politics will need to reflect our lives as they are actually lived. It won’t be pre-packaged, ready to pull off the shelf. It will have to be constructed from the best of our traditions and will have to account for the darker aspects of our past. We will need to understand just how we got to this place, this land of warring factions and tribal hatreds. And we’ll need to remind ourselves, despite all our differences, just how much we share: common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break.”
–from The Audacity of Hope
Before becoming the 44th President-elect of the United States, in July 2004, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchored itself in listeners’ minds, a reminder that for all the discord and struggle to be found in our history as a nation, we have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what President Obama called “the audacity of hope.”
In The Audacity of Hope, President Obama called for a different brand of politics–a politics for those weary of bitter partisanship and alienated by the “endless clash of armies” we see in congress and on the campaign trail; a politics rooted in the faith, inclusiveness, and nobility of spirit at the heart of “our improbable experiment in democracy.” He explores those forces–from the fear of losing to the perpetual need to raise money to the power of the media–that can stifle even thebest-intentioned politician. He also writes, with surprising intimacy and self-deprecating humor, about settling in as a senator, seeking to balance the demands of public service and family life, and his own deepening religious commitment.
At the heart of this book is President Obama’s vision of how we can move beyond our divisions to tackle concrete problems. He examines the growing economic insecurity of American families, the racial and religious tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threats–from terrorism to pandemic–that gather beyond our shores. And he grapples with the role that faith plays in a democracy–where it is vital and where it must never intrude. Underlying his stories about family, friends, members of the Senate, even the president, is a vigorous search for connection: the foundation for a radically hopeful political consensus.
President Obama wrote a book of transforming power. Only by returning to the principles that gave birth to our Constitution, he says, can Americans repair a political process that is broken, and restore to working order a government that has fallen dangerously out of touch with millions of ordinary Americans. Those Americans are out there, he writes–“waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.”
The Washington Post - Michael Kazin
… what's most impressive about Obama, 45, is an intelligence that his new book displays in abundance. He articulates a mode of liberalism that sounds both highly pragmatic and deeply moral. The Audacity of Hope -- the title comes from a sermon by his Chicago pastor -- trumpets no unifying theme or grand theory about how the American dream will be reclaimed and by whom. Chapters bear such prosaic titles as "Values," "Opportunity" and "Faith." But in a disarmingly modest way, Obama offers a more sensible perspective on "how we might begin the process of changing our politics and our civic life" than his more seasoned Capitol Hill colleagues have provided.
The New York Times Sunday Book Review - Gary Hart
In a very short time, Barack Obama has made himself into a figure of national interest, curiosity and some undefined hope. This book fully encourages those sentiments. His greatest test will be that of sensing the times, of matching his timing with the tides of the nation.
He is at his best when he writes things like this: "I find comfort in the fact that the longer I'm in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for power and rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience."The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
Portions of the volume read like outtakes from a stump speech, and the bulk of it is devoted to laying out Mr. Obama's policy positions on a host of issues, from education to health care to the war in Iraq.
But while Mr. Obama occasionally slips into the flabby platitudes favored by politicians, enough of the narrative voice in this volume is recognizably similar to the one in Dreams from My Father, an elastic, personable voice that is capable of accommodating everything from dense discussions of foreign policy to streetwise reminiscences, incisive comments on constitutional law to New-Agey personal asides.
Publishers Weekly
Obama reads his own words with the conviction and strength that listeners would expect from the Ilinois Democratic senator. The audacity of his hope echoes in each sentence he speaks as he lays the groundwork for reclaiming the values and inner strength that makes the United States so grand. While Obama is a great public speaker, those same skills could be overwhelming within the confines of an audiobook. Listeners will rejoice that he does not turn this reading opportunity into a six-hour speech. Instead, his cadence, speed and tone work to bring the listener from point to point, building inspiration through provocative thought rather than intense voice and personal charisma. Political inclinations will determine whether Obama's solutions or intentions are valued or disregarded. However, in his sincerest moments, he seizes hold of the problems plaguing the nation while criticizing both sides' failure to grasp the actual problem and to become bogged down in petty politics. He emphasizes the complexity of politics in a pluralist country spread out over millions of square miles. But even in his exploration of the political landscape, he does not hesitate to admit to his own limitations within the system. Simultaneous release with the Crown hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 2). (Nov.)
Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.Publishers Weekly
Obama reads his own words with the conviction and strength that listeners would expect from the Ilinois Democratic senator. The audacity of his hope echoes in each sentence he speaks as he lays the groundwork for reclaiming the values and inner strength that makes the United States so grand. While Obama is a great public speaker, those same skills could be overwhelming within the confines of an audiobook. Listeners will rejoice that he does not turn this reading opportunity into a six-hour speech. Instead, his cadence, speed and tone work to bring the listener from point to point, building inspiration through provocative thought rather than intense voice and personal charisma. Political inclinations will determine whether Obama's solutions or intentions are valued or disregarded. However, in his sincerest moments, he seizes hold of the problems plaguing the nation while criticizing both sides' failure to grasp the actual problem and to become bogged down in petty politics. He emphasizes the complexity of politics in a pluralist country spread out over millions of square miles. But even in his exploration of the political landscape, he does not hesitate to admit to his own limitations within the system. Simultaneous release with the Crown hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 2). (Nov.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
KLIATT
This book has been available in hardcover, audiobook, and trade paperback, but here it is now in a mass-market edition, highly affordable. It has been a bestseller for many months, especially as the campaign for President of the US has put Obama and his political ideas front and center in American life. Here in his own words he describes his basic political philosophies and how they have been formed in his own mind. He reveals himself to be a visionary—"reclaiming the American dream"—but all the while he shows he understands the complexities of problems and how difficult it can be to effect change. So, his pragmatic side is revealed, as well as his legal mind. Here are the chapter titles: Republicans and Democrats; Values; Our Constitution; Politics; Opportunity; Faith; Race; the World Beyond Our Borders; and Family. Throughout are woven his own personal experiences, past and present: an important book that can inform readers about how Obama thinks and lives. He is an accomplished writer, and his books have probably influenced voters as much as his speeches have. Reviewer: Claire Rosser
Library Journal
The Democrats' rising star wants U.S. politicians to start thinking big again. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Table of Contents:
Prologue 3Republicans and Democrats 17
Values 53
Our Constitution 85
Politics 121
Opportunity 162
Faith 231
Race 269
The World Beyond Our Borders 320
Family 383
Epilogue 417
Acknowledgments 429
Index 433
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