Saturday, February 8, 2020

Review of Jeanine Cummins book "American Dirt," - by Mary Cummins - NO RELATION

jeanine cummins, american dirt, jeanine c cummins, irish, mexican, immigrant, mexico, central american, undocumented, border, rape, murder, robbery, drug cartel


Finished the book "American Dirt." The weak plot is so implausible that my eyes could not stop rolling. But, it was the "Author's Note" at the end that made me almost throw my iPhone out the window (I read the book on iPhone as an epub).

The white author said she has so very, very much in common with this book and it's main characters. The book is about poor, brown, undocumented immigrants fleeing poverty, murder, gang violence in Mexico and Central America to come to the US. 100% white wealthy author Jeanine Cummins (no relation) said her husband was an undocumented immigrant just like the main character in her book so she understands their plight. She had a fear of him being deported once when they were pulled over during a regular traffic stop. Based on this traffic stop she said "so you could say I have a dog in the fight" for undocumented immigrants. She forgets to mention that her husband is a white professional Irishman with money in Maryland who flew here and merely over stayed a visa. He didn't walk 2,000 miles, get raped, assaulted, robbed, raped again, robbed again and murdered.

Cummins goes on to say that "she personally" suffered trauma in her life just like the main characters of her book when "her cousins" were raped, assaulted and then murdered after being pushed off a bridge while out of state. She forgets that the lone survivor admitted he was never pushed off the bridge. She lied about the main element of a book she wrote about her cousins' experience in order to sell more books. She went on to say their experience caused "her" life trauma which made her identify with the main character in her book who had 16 of her closest family members brutally murdered by the head of a Mexican drug cartel. The book characters were also raped, robbed, raped again, robbed again, assaulted...

Cummins continued by saying in the author's note that she also identifies with immigrants in her book because one of her grandmothers was born in Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans are US citizens. Cummins stated her Puerto Rican grandmother wasn't received well in the US because of her skin tone and hair. Her very wealthy university educated grandmother was white white with stick straight hair. WTF? That would be like me saying I understand the suffering of poor black children dying of tropical diseases in Africa because I have experienced similar things. Nope.

I see why there are so many very negative reviews of this book. I'll write a regular review tomorrow after I finish some work. I just had to get that "Author's Note" rant off my chest. This woman has a lot of nerve. Even after all the well deserved attacks she just has Oprah's book recommendation pinned to the top of her FB page. That is all that matters to her, money or should I say dinero.

I'll post a review of the full book later. I just had to rant about the author's ridiculous note first.

Below is from a Q & E with Cummins. What a dum dum dum. I hope this is just more lying otherwise this is really pathetic. For anyone who has ever driven from San Diego to the border at any time you can tell this is a story. I've been going there since I was a newborn up to just a few years ago.

Tijuana is 20 miles south of San Diego. You take the 805 to the 5 and hit the border check point which takes a while to get through. You would have to drive a long way around the check point to find an open place to just drive across accidentally. A sane person would have parked on the US side then walked to the border. There's parking there for this purpose. When she saw Mexicans selling Mexican shit she should have realized she was in Mexico. Cummins lies so much about being Puerto Rican, her father is Puerto Rican, her brother was thrown off the bridge...that it's hard to believe a word she says. "Everyone was hopping around on only one leg in Mexico. Everyone!"

Bookselling This Week: Where did the idea for this book come from?

"Jeanine Cummins: The first moment I felt like I should write about this happened many, many years ago, when my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, and I were vacationing in California. We had taken the week to drive the Pacific Coast Highway and our last stop was San Diego, and one day I drove down to the border by myself. My husband was an undocumented immigrant and I didn’t want him anywhere near the border, but I wanted to go and just see it. And I accidentally drove into Mexico, which you could still do then. It was pre-9/11 and the border was not militarized the way it is now.

I’d been to Mexico before, but I’d never been to the border. I was so shocked by what I saw there. There were so many young men with only one leg. There were young kids trying to sell gum or hats or piñatas or whatever touristy stuff they had to sell. I had no money because as soon as I got there, I got pulled over by the policía and they took it all. The fine print on my rental agreement said I couldn’t have the car I was driving in Mexico, and the officer said he would impound the car and I would have to wait in jail for a few days to talk to the judge. I was 21 or 22 (that would be 1995 before she met her husband when she was still in college in Maryland), and I was terrified. I said I couldn’t go to prison (soooo dramatic! that's not how it works), and he said, well, maybe there’s another way. You can pay a fine. And I said, how much is the fine? And he said, how much you got?

I gave him all my money, and then I waited five hours in line to get through U.S. Customs and Border Protection to get back into the United States. After crossing accidentally in seven seconds (HUGE lie). So, I was sitting at the border for many, many hours, just observing all these young kids, and I must have seen five for six young men with only one leg. And I didn’t understand what I was looking at. When I got home to New York, I started researching. I came across “La Bestia,” and I came to understand that these were men from Central America and southern Mexico who had, in all likelihood, ridden the train to the border and had fallen off at some point and been maimed. I came to understand how common this was, that it’s happening every single day. In the effort to just reach the U.S. border, never mind cross it, people are being killed and maimed daily. It’s commonplace. And I was like, why don’t I know about this? Why don’t people in the U.S. know this story?

I never stopped thinking about that, and for many years, I felt an enormous reluctance to write about it. I felt, very clearly, that it just wasn’t my story to tell. And even when I started thinking about writing about the border, I resisted writing from a migrant’s point of view for a long time. But if I really wanted to get into it, then the correct thing to do was to tell the story of the people who were suffering."

Cummins previously wrote a book about the potato famine. She was asked why she wrote the book. She replied "people starved during the potato famine. Not many people know about this. I have to educate them." Everyone knows about the potato famine. It's part of history class.

Mary Cummins of Animal Advocates is a wildlife rehabilitator licensed by the California Department of Fish and Game. Mary Cummins is also a licensed real estate appraiser in Los Angeles, California.

Mary Cummins, Mary K. Cummins, Mary Katherine Cummins, Mary Cummins-Cobb, Mary, Cummins, Cobb, real estate, appraiser, appraisal, instructor, teacher, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Pasadena, Brentwood, Bel Air, California, licensed, permitted, single family, condo, pud, hud, fannie mae, freddie mac, uspap, certified, residential, certified resident, apartment building, multi-family, commercial, industrial, expert witness, civil, criminal, orea, dre, insurance, bonded, experienced, bilingual, spanish, english, form, 1004, 2055, land, raw, acreage, vacant, insurance, cost, income approach, market analysis, comparative, theory, appraisal theory, cost approach, sales, matched pairs, plot, plat, map, diagram, photo, photographs, photography, rear, front, street, subject, comparable, sold, listed, active, pending, expired, cancelled, listing, mls, multiple listing service, claw, themls,
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