Family sentence : the search for my Cuban-revolutionary, prison-yard, mythic-hero, deadbeat dad / Jeanine Cornillot.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cornillot, Jeanine, 1965-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cornillot, Jeanine, 1965-.

Cornillot, Jeanine.

Cornillot, Jeanine, 1965---Family.

Cuban Americans--Biography.

Cuban Americans.

Irish Americans--Biography.

Irish Americans.

Fathers and daughters--United States.

Fathers and daughters.

Children of prisoners--United States--Biography.

Children of prisoners.

Intercultural communication--United States.

Intercultural communication.

Family reunions--United States.

Family reunions.

Little Havana (Miami, Fla.)--Biography.

Little Havana (Miami, Fla.).

Philadelphia (Pa.)--Biography.

Philadelphia (Pa.).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (230 p.)

Place of Publication:

Boston : Beacon Press, c2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Jeanine Cornillot was just two years old when her father, a former Cuban revolutionary turned anti-Castro militant, was sentenced to thirty years in a Florida prison for political bombings. His absence left a single mother to raise four children who kept his incarceration a secret and conjured a mythic father-hero out of his occasional letters. Jeanine's Irish American mother struggled to support the family in suburban Philadelphia. Summers, she put Jeanine on a plane to Little Havana, where she lived with her Spanish-speaking grandparents and bilingual cousin-a sometimes unreliable translator. It was there in Florida that she met her father face to face, in the prison yards. As Cornillot travels between these two worlds, a wryly funny and unsentimental narrator emerges. Whether meeting her father for the first time at age six and hoping she looks Cuban enough, imagining herself a girl-revolutionary leading protest marches, dreamily planning her father's homecoming after his prison break, or writing to demand an end to his forty-four-day hunger strike after he's recaptured, young Jeanine maintains a hopeful pragmatism that belies her age. Eventually, a child's mythology is replaced with an adult's reality in a final reckoning with her father, remarkable for the unsparing honesty on both sides. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Contents:

Five things I know

Kids' guidebook to prison

Open skies

Shadow fathers

Men are people too

The Little Havana abductions

Brothers big and small

Spanish lesson

Man in the house

Good crimes

The hunger letters

Getting by

I [love] Ponch

Postcards from prison

Free at last!

Hard times, again

The worst family reunion ever.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-8070-0039-6

OCLC:

547487282