Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. An Autobiography

A personal account of what it has cost the author, nonmonetarily, to be educated beyond his origins as the son of Mexican immigrants rejects affirmative action and bilingualism as benign errors

Hunger Of Memory is the story of a 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.

Here is the poignant journey is 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.

Provocative in its positions on affirmative action and bilingual education, Hunger Of Memory is a powerful political statement, a profound study of the importance of language... and the moving, intimate portrait of a boy struggling to become a man.

"Arresting...Splendidly written intellectual autobiography." -- Boston Globe

"Superb autobiographical essay... Mr. Rodriguez offers himself as an example if the long labor of change: its costs, about which he is movingly frank, its loneliness, but also its triumph." -- The New York Times Book Review