1	Film & TV Chameleon actor Jesse Garcia defies stereotype, and Rodrigo de la Serna relives a great escape. read more...
2	Music Kat de Luna lights up the charts with her new album while the Orishas release a CD of their best. read more...
3	Books Scribes share their insights on Dominican women, WWII vets and Hugo Chávez. read more...
4	Calendar Our monthly list of premier events throughout the U.S. read more...

Latin Forum

BOOKS

Winter Reads

By VICTOR CRUZ-LUGO

A Legacy Greater than Words: Stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas of the World War II Generation
By Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, Juliana Torres, Melissa DiPiero-D’Sa and Lindsay Fitzpatrick
The University of Texas Press
www.defendthehonor.org
$30

Even as the Hispanic contribution to the World War II effort is often overlooked, there exist efforts like the University of Texas at Austin’s U.S. Latino & Latina WWII Oral History Project and its book A Legacy Greater than Words. This image-rich 344-page tome includes 425 stories of men and women interviewed for the acclaimed and ongoing WWII Project documenting the Hispanic contribution to the war. The WWII Project is a lead organizer of Defend the Honor, a grass-roots public awareness campaign to assure that Hispanics of the WWII generation are included in documentaries, books and other historical accounts.

My Daughter’s Eyes and Other Stories
By Annecy Báez
Curbstone Press
www.curbstone.org
$15

With remarkable economy and understated eloquence, author Annecy Báez offers 14 urban tales that subtly illuminate the guarded interiors of her characters. Báez’s prose evokes the hidden yearnings of young Dominican women as they make their hopeful, quietly charged, and often pained passage through emotional terrain as gritty as the Bronx, New York, neighborhoods where their stories take place. A psychotherapist by training, Báez dares to take on taboo themes in a volume that manages to be slender without lacking heft, and which captures a universe of longings through the eyes of a few compelling, and thoughtfully rendered, protagonists.

Hugo Chávez:
The Definitive Biography of Venezuela’s Controversial President
By Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka
Random House
www.randomhouse.com
$27.95

A bestselling critical success following its 2004 publication in Spanish, this penetrating biography of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is now available in English. Probing into the events that surround the birth and growth of the man, and the creation of his myth, this aptly self-described “definitive biography” maintains a cool head and a clear journalist’s eye throughout. Written by investigative reporter Cristina Marcano and editorial columnist Alberto Barrera Tyszka, and featuring an enlightening introductory essay by Moisés Naím—Venezuela’s former minister of trade and industry and current editor and publisher of Foreign Policy—this is the quintessential text making sense of the larger-than-life figure that is Chávez.