 "A little disappointing" | 2007-09-18 |
| - Reviewed By ryfoot |
My mom and I both recently read this book and our reactions were the same as we discussed our thoughts. When we were finished with the book, there was a sense of something missing. The sub-title of the book - "My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana" - is misleading. It should have been "My Visits to Moscow and Beijing and My Spur-of-the-Moment Holiday in Havana." Ms. Griest didn't really have a life in any of those places. It would be like me writing a book called, "My Life in Thailand, Germany,and Puerto Rico." All places I have spent some time, but my "life" is where I have resided for many years. I agree with the reviewer who said this should have been a MySpace page - which is exactly where I put the (amusing and insightful!) tales of my adventures in foreign countries.
Don't get me wrong, this book is not without some merit and Ms. Griest does relate some interesting experiences. The most interesting part to me was her short trip to Havana. Cuba is a mystery to most of us and I was surprised to hear that the people aren't quite as depressed and miserable as I had imagined. When they can't do anything about it, people tend to make the best of whatever situation they are in. But, all in all, it was just a light-weight travelogue for us. |
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 "Fantastic" | 2007-06-01 |
| - Reviewed By pivorino |
| I could not put this book down. Her voice is refreshing and honest. I learned a lot about all of the places she lives in. I found the part about the censorship in China to be especially revealing. |
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 "This Book is Such a Pleasure." | 2007-05-02 |
| - Reviewed By iread321 |
| This book energized me. Reading this book was almost as fun as traveling. I can't wait to visit Cuba. But this story is not just about travel. It's also about identity, family, language, and everything else important. Every traveller and every young woman must read this book. Keep your eye on this author! She's going to make it big. She's going to show us the world with fresh eyes. |
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| "Shoulda been a MySpace page" | 2007-04-16 |
| - Reviewed By sounder9 |
| I guess when you're 59, like me, you shouldn't be buying books written by people under 25. Around the Bloc is sort of the tale of somebody's junior year abroad. Unfortunately, it takes more than a year to learn anything valid about somebody else's culture. So here's a woman who's reaped the affirmative action benefits of being Mexican in gringo America, and when a Cuban asks her what country she's from, she says "Canada." That's when I tossed the book into the box for the used book store. This woman needs to go live in the third world someplace for 15 years, without the benefit of a paycheck from the US. Then she can write a book. |
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| "A "coming of age story" sounds just way too cliched for this hombre...lo siento..." | 2006-11-20 |
| - Reviewed By gtowna |
Ay, caramba!
AROUND THE BLOC is more than a coming of age story, dear Readers.
The following is a laundry list of what you're genuinely missing when you ascribe such facile titles to this amazing little read:
1) The wonderful (and many) impactful lines of prose that emanate from the pen of someone so young, yet with so much on the ball (at the time of writing, that is -- the "young" part, not the "on the ball" part). Griest is possessed of an awareness that few individuals of mixed ethnicity and/or race choose to properly acknowledge. Inside the pages of this book, Elizondo Griest attacks this concept with a doggedness and reckless deliberation that's so downright inspirational! I would like to travel in her wake.
2) There were several passages which I came across where I just had to place the book down beside me to take a deep "resetting" breath. How author managed to touch so many sensitive chords within me, I'm positive the effect was similar on the others. Ms. Elizondo Griest doesn't hold punches. When she refers to things like love, lust, heartbreak, depression, devastation, and sex, she does **precisely** that. When Griest refers to how pained she was when the man who meant everything in her life dropped her for the second time (in as many chances), you hurt right along there with her. If you don't, you don't have much of a emotional bone within your body. Someone so outspoken and delightful doesn't deserve to get hurt like that. At least this was my initial reaction.
3) This is a young woman who has criss-crossed the world and back again, all in an attempt to seek the answers for the most essential life-donning questions which those of us who take such things for granted are never inclined to ask. Essential burning questions of indentity. Of the need and desire to understand who she really is at her core--not as a by-product of some consumerist collective--or where she really came from. By dipping into the collective unconsciousness of several nations of which she herself wasn't a descendant (Russia, China)...then beginning to relate these lessons to the things she knew and loved about herself (which came about more in Havana). Just gorgeous. In several spots the narrative, the author delivered up this story with a dramatist's expert flourish.
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The pages just turned. I never **once** felt a need to stop reading (the only time I had was because I'd been interupted by something other than the read).
Intentionally, I believe, Griest constructs the narrative with a rising crescendo. The story commences in Moscow, Russia and moves through Beijing, China. As the journey concludes in Havana, Cuba, in a country closest to her US home, Stephanie comes face to face with a daemon which has been dogging her for most of her early adult life.
When she least expects to find the answer which has been plaguing her mercilessly, as she describes it, it confronts her hard. It hammers her when she finds herself doing an activity which one might consider enough to pull her thoughts away from such critical existential questions. Dancing the rhumba, or talking with a couple of Cuban college students on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean.
Rather than writing AROUND THE BLOC and ending things with a question mark, Elizondo Griest is even more convinced by the book's end about the righteousness of her choice of having travelled around the entire world, steadfast in her desire to want to know more about her essential self.
Like a highly sympathetic character in a novel or a film, you really want this person to succeed--dareisay win (?)--because the righteousness of her mission is just so important. It becomes as important to you as it initially is to Stephanie.
Haven't we all had such dilemmas in our life?
In this age of mixed identities, to be able to claim a purity of a connection to one's ancient or not-so-ancient culture is indeed a complicated decision, rife with paradoxes.
Even those who are "so-and-so"--how much of that "so-and-so" can they really be in the face of an environment which pulls them into defining themselves as something much more general than merely the binding specificity of one particular race or (former?) nation-state?
There are so many things which lay claim to our selves, at our cores. Griest cannot be blamed for having been sucked into this simplifying evening-out vortex, too. So deep has she been submerged into the commonality of the "Western experience," that it has become a compelling struggle to pull herself out. Like it is for others in her situation, who have written about things similarly.
It has been an honour and a privilege to follow her along her path. I can't thank her enough for having made me a part.
It's been to a gift to witness the changes, as she wrote about them, and as the book appears to be the culmination of many months and years of introspection and sometimes piercing self-doubt.
I've cherished each and every one of these pages. Thank you Stephanie.
If there ever were a sixth Amazonian star, it would go to Stephanie Elizondo Griest.
--ADM in Prague |
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| "An Engaging Coming of Age Tale for an Aspiring Radical" | 2006-09-08 |
| - Reviewed By mathman180 |
Stephanie Griest grew up the model assimilated Latina in Corpus Christi, Texas, an idealistic high school activist and aspiring journalist who spoke no Spanish and maintained no connection to her Mexican roots. Fearful of being trapped in a stultifying life of strip malls and Taco Bell-hood, she longed to experience the sights and peoples of the world beyond. After enrolling in the school of journalism at the University of Texas, Ms. Griest embarked on a four-year odyssey that took her through the heart of the Communist world: first Moscow, then Beijing, and finally Havana. AROUND THE BLOC is her memoir of those experiences, a story about growing up and discovering one's own strengths and beliefs by using other lives, languages, and cultures as a mirror into her own life and her severed Mexican roots.
Ms. Griest begins her story in Moscow. Having been a student of Russian at the University of Texas (UT), she has moderate language facility in the country but no clue about the peoples and lifestyles she is about to experience during her study abroad. She arrived looking for the spirit of revolution, but what she found was the spirit of incipient and mostly lawless capitalism, a world in which the Russian Mafiosi were the dominant economic force and the locus of most private wealth. Mixing current events with stories of personal friendships and romantic relationships, Ms. Griest also draws a compelling and heartfelt portrait of life in late 1990s Russia as lived by its average citizens. We see their homes, taste their foods, and feel part of their family relationships.
After returning to UT, the author finagles a position via the Henry Luce Foundation as an English language copy editor for a Chinese government newspaper China Daily in Beijing. While her observations about Chinese life are perceptive and generally accurate, her position as an aspiring reporter and her minimal knowledge of Mandarin create a distance from her subject matter that would be less noticeable if it didn't follow so closely upon the human warmth and personal connectedness of her Moscow sojourn. Her Beijing stories take on the tinge of the reporter/tourist: seeing Mao Zedong's embalmed body at his tomb in Tiananmen Square, trying to understand the events of June 4, 1989 (the Tiananmen Square massacres), visiting museums and art galleries and gay bars. While she captures nicely at least some elements of Chinese life and culture, Ms. Griest rather misses the sense of revolutionary change taking place in the lives of average Chinese citizens. Here again, her writings about Moscow shine by comparison.
Finally, and unlawfully, Ms. Griest travels with a friend to Havana for a two-month underground excursion of Cuban life. By this time, the author is in danger of being little more than a cultural slummer, but she thankfully avoids that trap and manages to return to her Moscow form. Perhaps because she is not locked into the journalism mold that held her in check in Beijing, Ms. Griest's writing in Havana recaptures its freshness and spontaneity. As readers, we once again feel the people's lives - their struggles, their joys and sorrows, their foods and entertainments. Her Havana and its residents take on the sense of life and liveliness that seemed lacking in her Beijing and its people.
Not surprisingly, after all is said and done, Ms. Griest finds in herself a changed person. She is less committed to idealistic revolution and more committed to rediscovering her own Mexican roots - learning to speak Spanish and acknowledging her heritage rather than running from it. As is so often the case, one can only see one's own country, culture, and self clearly through the perspective gained by experiencing those same things in unfamiliar lands. Would that more Texans (such as Mr. Bush) and more Americans followed Ms. Griest's path to self-discovery. A little less xenophobia and America-centered hubris, and a little more cultural understanding and empathy, would stand this citizens and leaders of this country in good stead. Stephanie Griest's discovery that radicalism begins at home is a worthwhile lesson for us all. |
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 "not bad" | 2005-06-07 |
| - Reviewed By codecruncher |
I enjoyed the little travelogue by Stephanie Griest. However, I was hoping to get more stories of adventure type quality than the 3 locations she spoke about (Russia, China, Cuba).
When she talks about stealing bed sheets in Russia, or chugging alcohol at her first introductory lunch in China, the book is great. You sit back and laugh and connect with the cultural "mistakes" the traveler is going through. Nevertheless, her decision to really find her identity and talk about her degree of "exploration" was either a little boring, or perhaps too much information than I wanted to know.
I was also hoping to hear much more on the Cuban section. I think this relates more to the fact of the difficulty she had to face getting there; so in a way it makes some sense. But to me that place so close to the US and more "unknown" would have created some interesting stories.
This book actually reminded me of another book I read by a journalist named Jan Wong. The book is called "Red China Blues", and is very similar but I would have to say it's better (even though it focuses only on China). If you liked this book I would recomend that one as well, and I would easily recommend this book to anyone interested in a light travelgoue read. |
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| "Hope OFAC doesn't read this book..." | 2005-04-30 |
| - Reviewed By User: A35TAQSNHGWWLV |
| ...and prosecute her for breaking the law. I will rarely agree with Griest's politics (with the exception of Cuba), but I still enjoyed her travelogue. Her firsthand experiences with communism are enlightening for those who wish to travel to these countries. I look forward to reading her next book about Mexico. |
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| "A big round circle seach of one's inner roots" | 2005-02-16 |
| - Reviewed By hoppyfrog |
This is more than just a travel book; it's the author's odyssey to search of her roots. Being half Mexican and half American, Stephanie struggles with her native culture. Instead of learning Spanish and exploring Mexico, she studies Russian, Chinese, and eventually travel to a lot of the Communist countries and submerge into foreign cultures. In the end, she realize in order to understand other cultures, one must accept his/her own root. It's a big round circle of journey.
I gauge how realistic Stephanie's account of Russia and Cuba by her description of the Chinese, since I know a great deal about China myself. I find what she said about the modern day Chinese funny and relatively accurate. Some exaggerations are there to make the stories more vivid and interesting, but it's not very far from the truth. (i.e. "Eating Tofu" in Chinese doesn't mean having oral sex. It means being taken advantage of sexually. But other Chinese phrases are very accurate.)
I highly recommend this book who wants to armchair-travel to these counties and learn about their modern day cultures.
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| "VIva Stephanie!" | 2004-11-05 |
| - Reviewed By deziree |
Loved her book, her easy style, the author's sense of adventure as well as her self-avowed weaknesses. It opened my eyes to many states of being. Re previous reviewer: Identity is always an issue, especially when the the dominant culture refuses to acknowledge it.
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