On a recent Friday afternoon inside his Laguna Niguel home, Frank Cruz, now 80, looked back at his extensive life — from his boyhood in Tucson’s Barrio Hollywood, to his post-Air Force days at East Los Angeles College, to the succession of achievements he details in his memoir “Straight Out of Barrio Hollywood: The Adventures of Telemundo Co-founder Frank H. Cruz,” co-authored by Rita Joiner Soza.
Over his long career, Cruz has infiltrated spaces where few Latinos had stepped foot before — namely, media spaces that ignored the diverse and growing Latino population in Los Angeles. But this wasn’t his plan as a boy back in Tucson. As he puts it, Cruz likes to say he got into journalism “totally by accident.”
Meng Jin’s ambitious, formally complex debut opens in Beijing at the climax of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, as a woman gives birth in a hospital ward that will soon be filled with the wounded. The maternity nurse who tends to Su Lan and her new baby is skeptical of the idealistic pro-democracy protesters: “Little gods, she thinks. Desperate to turn their own growing bodies, their own aches and despairs, into material that might reset the axes of worlds.” This desperation is also what drives Su Lan, we see in the three linked monologues that circle back to tell her story after her death 17½ years later.
We don’t need Marie Kondo to tell us that we stockpile way too much stuff. So you might ask why you should acquire another book, especially one that may not spark joy — actually, it’s more likely to spark deep dismay about the staggering amount of waste that contemporary consumers produce. You might think of Adam Minter’s “Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale” as the hair shirt you don after relishing your brand-new Christmas booty. But this fascinating account of what happens to that sweater you bag for Goodwill or the totaled car your insurance company writes off, is eye-opening — and even surprisingly hopeful. Sometimes one man’s trash is indeed someone else’s treasure.
Should we try to think of ourselves not as individuals but as parts of the physical and cultural ecosystem? Tom Oliver, an ecologist specialising in land use, the climate crisis and biodiversity, believes we need a major shift in that direction. His view is that science now demands this change, and that only by making it will we become capable of responding to global warming and a host of other problems. The idea of the self as a relatively closed system is a delusion that has often conferred advantage, but is now a dangerous trap. Moving through difficult science with valuable clarity, Oliver tells us why.