Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography Hardback - 2013

Praise for Darling

“Richard Rodriguez may be the most empathic essayist in America….His sentences are reliable joys: liquid and casual, they slip in and out of philosophy and anecdote noiselessly, like people padding through an empty chapel, expecting to hear nothing more than the sound of their own passage.”—Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker

“An eccentric mélange of a book….Under Rodriguez’ guidance…all the pieces are connected slowly until the project as a whole reveals itself. It’s as if you’ve been wandering for miles in a desert and, suddenly, your salvation appears.”—NPR.org

“[With a] sophisticate and compassionate vision....[Richard Rodriguez] is, quite simply, one of the finest prose stylists now writing in English.”—Shelf Awareness

“A rich tapestry, a Persian carpet of a book….The deep pleasures of [Darling] defy the usual capsule account.”—SF Gate
 
“[Rodriguez reveals] truths about our culture that are not immediately obvious but are somehow familiar….If Rodriguez’s meditations are a desert, they constitute a paradoxical landscape that is simultaneously open and teeming.”—Kirkus

“Engaging and readable, this highly personal and candid discovery…will delight Rodriguez’s fans.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“With compassion and profundity of vision, Rodriguez offers a compelling view of modern spirituality that is as multifaceted as it is provocative.”—Kirkus (starred review)

Praise for Brown: The Last Discovery of America

“It may be a while yet before America is as comfortable with the ambiguities of its complexion as Rodriguez is. In the meantime, he injects some desperately needed complexity into America’s thorniest debate.”—Mother Jones
 
“The recurrent strands of [Rodriguez’s] though—family, religion, education, race, sex, California, America, Mexico—gain new resonance each time and stand, in the end, for the complexity of a whole greater than the sum of its parts.”—The New York Times Book Review

Praise for Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father

“Days of Obligation looks into America—north and south of the Rio Grande—as penetratingly and eloquently as Camus did when he compared the mental landscapes of France and Algiers.”—David Lohrey, The Los Angeles Times Book Review

“It is like nothing I have ever read before, and the sheer dazzle of its suggestions says more about America than anything I have read since Lawrence.”—Pico Iyer, author of Falling Off the Map