CANR
WORK TITLE: INVISIBLE PEOPLE
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME: CA 363
http://journalism.uoregon.edu/user/tizon/ http://www.hmhco.com/shop/books/Big-Little-Man/9780547450483
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born October 30, 1959, in Manila, Philippines; died March 23, 2017, in Eugene, OR; immigrated to the United States, 1964; married (divorced); married; wife’s name Melissa; children: Dylan, Maya.
EDUCATION:University of Oregon, B.S., 1984; Stanford University, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, journalist, and educator. Seattle Times, staff writer, 1986-2003; Los Angeles Times, Seattle, WA, bureau chief and national correspondent, 2003-08; Knight International fellow, 2009-10; University of Oregon, Eugene, assistant professor of journalism, 2010-17.
AWARDS:Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting (corecipient), 1997; Knight International Press fellow, 2009-10; J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation, 2011, for Big Little Man; Jefferson fellow.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the Atlantic, Newsweek, and Sierra.
SIDELIGHTS
Alex Tizon was a former reporter for the Seattle Times and a former bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. A corecipient of a Pulitzer Prize for a story about a corrupt federally sponsored housing program for Native Americans, Tizon covered numerous high-profile stories such as the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina and its devastation of New Orleans. He also returned to his homeland to cover the Philippine government’s efforts to address the issue of poverty.
Born in the Philippines, Tizon and his family immigrated to the United States when he was child. In his memoir, Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self, Tizon discusses his own life as an Asian American male and, in the process, explores the psyche of Asian American males in general and various issues about race and identity. When Tizon first decided he wanted to write a book, his initial proposals to two publishers were not presented as a memoir and were rejected. When a friend told him that the themes he was exploring also applied to him, his friend suggested that he write the book as memoir. Tizon subsequently received three offers from publishers.
“The story that I ended up writing actually was very untraditional in its structure,” Tizon wrote in an article for the Nieman Storyboard Web site, adding: “It was only part memoir. It was also part history, part sociology, and even a little bit of science. It ended up that my own story was just the skeleton of the larger story that I wanted to write, which was about race and manhood.”
As Tizon began writing the memoir for publication, he realized that “race and manhood” were expansive topics with broad-ranging sociological implications and that these topics have been written about extensively by sociologists, psychiatrists, and others. Even after he had completed two or three chapters, Tizon was struggling to determine how he would address all the issues he wanted to write about. Then, a friend kept asking him what his book was really about in terms of a universal theme. “The theme, I came to realize, was shame,” Tizon wrote in the Nieman Storybook Web site article. “That’s what drove the narrative. The topic was race and manhood, but the theme that gave it momentum, that gave it the narrative engine, was shame.”
Tizon relates that he suffered from shame as a Filipino American immigrant because of his color, his facial features, his height, and his country of origin. He felt this shame because of the American society he and his family moved to, a society that, writes Tizon, taught him to be ashamed through its depictions of and attitudes about Asian Americans. He recounts one incident while his family was living in the Bronx during the 1970s. He was a senior in high school when he had an encounter with another kid in the neighborhood who pointed a gun at him.
That night, Tizon lay awake in bed all night, unable to sleep. He was less upset by the potentially fatal encounter than by the fact that the other kid had called him Chinese. Tizon writes in his memoir that he felt humiliated being grouped with other Asians, leading to a loss of his own identity and individuality. “This motif of disappearance is an important one, which Tizon traces convincingly through the memoir,” wrote Star Tribune contributor Sun Yung Shin, adding: “It is especially moving as it relates to his father—his struggles to support his family and fulfill his role as a man.”
Tizon recounts intimate details of the shame he felt. At one point he measures his reproductive organ with a ruler trying to show that he does not fit the widely held belief that Asian men are not well endowed. The overall smaller stature of Asian men in comparison to the general U.S. population also fosters feelings of inadequacy in Asian men, writes Tizon. Tizon notes in his book: “The size of American bodies came to represent American capacities in everything we desired. They were smarter, stronger, richer; they lived in comfort and had the surplus to be generous.” When Tizon looked at himself and his own family, he saw only smallness in all aspects of their life, in both their physical appearances and their stature in American society.
Tizon recounts his travels to Asia, where he learned that intellect has long been valued much more than physical prowess. He also discusses his first failed marriage to a white woman and his second marriage to a Filipina. Tizon writes that he eventually overcame many of his feelings of inadequacy as he began to see the emergence of Asians in various areas of American society, including business, the media, and sports.
“His own personal story—and his growing awareness of the significance of race in shaping that experience—is interwoven with discussions of the broader experience of Asians and Asian-Americans in politics, entertainment, journalism, sports and even world history,” wrote PopMatters Web site contributor Hans Rollman, adding later in the same review: “There’s a larger narrative here as well; one about how human beings treat each other.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called Big Little Man “a deft, illuminating memoir and cultural history.”
Tizon died in Eugene, Oregon in 2017. He was fifty-seven years old. In 2019, a collection of some of his articles was released under the title, Invisible People: Stories of Lives at the Margins. The volume includes an introduction by Sam Howe Verhovek, who also edited the book, and a foreword by Jose Antonio Vargas. The articles in the book span the years 1994 to 2017 and include two autobiographical pieces. Among the autobiographical pieces is “My Family’s Slave,” in which Tizon fondly recalls a woman who worked for his mother’s family without pay. The woman’s name was Eudocia Tomas Pulido. Tizon recalls his own interactions with Pulido and reflects on his role in passively supporting her indentured servitude. The subjects of other stories include a Wyoming Muslim family’s experience after the September 11th attacks, a Native American family determined to posthumously exonerate their ancestor, American psychiatrists’ difficulty in dealing with Cambodians’ genocidal trauma, a UFO investigator, and surfing missionaries in Hawaii.
A Kirkus Reviews writer described the book as “a memorable collection that shows how much journalism lost with the early death of one of its finest.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly predicted that readers “will come away from this collection with an appreciation for his unquestionable ability to narrate unusual stories in memorable ways.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Tizon, Alex, Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston, MA), 2014.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2014, Eloise Kinney, review of Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self, p. 65.
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2014, review of Big Little Man.
Library Journal, May 15, 2014, Janet Ingraham Dwyer, review of Big Little Man, p. 98.
Publishers Weekly, March 10, 2014, review of Big Little Man, p. 51.
States News Service, July 16, 2014, “Q&A with Alex Tizon: Big Little Man.”
ONLINE
Alex Tizon, http://alextizon.com (September 21, 2014).
AsAm News, http://www.asamnews.com/ (July 13, 2014), “Meet Alex Tizon, the Big Little Man,” author interview.
Flavorwire, http://flavorwire.com/ (July 3, 2014), Elisabeth Donnelly, “Big Little Man Author Alex Tizon on Asian-American Masculinity, ‘Post-Racial’ America, and Writing about Penis Size.”
Hyphen, http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/ (April 21, 2014), Joyce Chen, “Books: Alex Tizon Unearths ‘How to Be a Man’ in New Book on Asian Masculinity.”
International Examiner, http://www.iexaminer.org/ (June 6, 2014), Peter Bacho, “Big Little Man: A Conversation with Journalist Alex Tizon.”
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2019, review of Invisible People: Stories of Lives at the Margins.
Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/ (June 26, 2014), Wesley Yang, review of Big Little Man.
Nieman Storyboard, http://www.niemanstoryboard.org/ (October 31, 2012), Alex Tizon, “Telling Your Own Story.”
Northwest Asian Weekly Online, http://www.nwasianweekly.com/ (June 26, 2014), Daria Kroupoderova, “Alex Tizon: One Asian Man in Search of Self.”
Oregon Humanities, http://oregonhumanities.org/ (August 8, 2014), Alex Tizon, “Small Man in a Big Country.”
PopMatters, http://www.popmatters.com/ (August 7, 2014), Hans Rollman, review of Big Little Man.
Positively Filipino, http://www.positivelyfilipino.com/ (August 19, 2014), Anthony Maddel, review of Big Little Man.
Publishers Weekly, August 29, 2019, review of Invisible People, p. 85.
Register-Guard Online, http://registerguard.com/ (April 17, 2011), “UO Journalism Prof Wins $30,000 Book Prize.”
Seattle Times, http://seattletimes.com/ (April 8, 1997), Chuck Taylor, “Reporters’ Relentless Pursuit of Facts Won Times 2 Pulitzers—Two Pulitzer Prizes”; (June 13, 2014), David Takami, review of Big Little Man.
South China Morning Post, http://www.scmp.com/ (September 20, 2014), Alex Tizon, “My Life.”
Star Tribune, http://www.startribune.com/ (June 15, 2014), Sun Yung Shin, review of Big Little Man.
University of Oregon, School of Journalism and Communications, http:// journalism.uoregon.edu/ (September 21, 2014), author profile.
Voice of America Online, http://www.voanews.com/ (September 20, 2014), Jim Stevenson, “Q&A with Alex Tizon: Big Little Man.”
OBITUARIES
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/ (March 31, 2017), Daniel E. Slotnik.
Seattle Times, https://www.seattletimes.com/ (March 25, 2017), Mike Rosenberg.
Alex Tizon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Alex Tizon
Born
Tomas Alexander Asuncion Tizon
October 30, 1959
Manila, Philippines
Died
March 23, 2017 (aged 57)
Eugene, Oregon, U.S.
Occupation
Author, professor (University of Oregon)
Citizenship
United States and Philippines
Alma mater
University of Oregon
Stanford University
Notable works
Big Little Man
Notable awards
Anthony J. Lukas Book Prize, 2011[1]
International Journalism Fellowship, 2009[2]
Knight I Jefferson Fellowship, 1998
Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Journalism, 1997[3]
Website
alextizon.com (archived from December 2016)
Tomas Alexander Asuncion Tizon (October 30, 1959 – March 23, 2017) was a Filipino-American author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.[4] His book Big Little Man, a memoir and cultural history, explores themes related to race, masculinity, and personal identity.[5] Tizon taught at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication.[6] His final story, titled "My Family's Slave", was published as the cover story of the June 2017 issue of The Atlantic after his death, sparking significant debate.[7]
Contents
1
Biography
2
Work
3
Big Little Man
4
Death
5
References
Biography[edit]
Tizon was born Tomas Alexander Asuncion Tizon in Manila, Philippines on October 30, 1959, the second of five[8] children. He immigrated with his family in 1964, shortly before the first big wave of Asian immigration to the United States in the postwar era. His childhood was marked by financial hardship and frequent long-distance moves. Through twelve grades, he attended eight schools from Honolulu to New York City. He earned degrees from the University of Oregon and Stanford University.[6] In 1997, Tizon won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Towards the end of his life, he wrote a piece in The Atlantic about a Filipina peasant woman who was his family's slave. This woman helped to raise Tizon's mother, all of her children and Tizon's daughters.[7][9]
Work[edit]
As a reporter for The Seattle Times, he and two colleagues won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for a five-part series about fraud and mismanagement in the Federal Indian Housing Program.[10]
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Tizon and photographer Alan Berner drove from Seattle to Ground Zero in New York City, chronicling their journey with a multi-part series called "Crossing America – Dispatches From a New Nation," which explored the changes brought about by the attacks.[11] In 2002, he and Berner made another trip to Ground Zero, this time taking a southern route, and produced the series, "Crossing America – One Year Later."[12]
Tizon was Seattle Bureau Chief for the Los Angeles Times from 2003 to 2008.[6] He was a Knight International Journalism Fellow based in Manila in 2009 and 2010.[13]
Big Little Man[edit]
He expanded upon his journalistic themes—exiles, immigrants, social outcasts, people searching for identity or purpose—in a personal way in his book Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self. Tizon told his own story as a first-generation immigrant and an Asian male growing up in the United States to examine cultural mythologies related to race and gender, in particular the Western stereotypes of Asian men and women.[5] The book won the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Work-In-Progress Award, sponsored by Columbia University and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard.[14]
Death[edit]
Tizon was found dead in his home in Eugene, Oregon, on March 23, 2017. He was 57. His death appeared to be the result of natural causes.[15]
The last story Tizon wrote was an article for The Atlantic titled "My Family's Slave" in which he described how his parents had kept a peasant woman named Eudocia Tomas Pulido as a household slave, even after emigrating to the U.S. from the Philippines. He died the day that The Atlantic's editorial staff decided the article would be featured on the magazine's front cover, but before they could tell him of their decision.[16]
Alex Tizon, Journalist Who Wrote of Alienation as Asian-American, Dies at 57
Image
Alex Tizon at a workshop in 1991. He shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for articles on a housing program for Native Americans.
Credit
Credit
The Seattle Times
By Daniel E. Slotnik
March 31, 2017
Alex Tizon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter whose well-received 2014 memoir documented his insecurities and alienation as a Filipino-American, was found dead on March 23 in his home in Eugene, Ore. He was 57.
His wife, Melissa, said that he had died in his sleep and that the cause had not yet been determined.
At The Seattle Times, where he shared a Pulitzer in investigative reporting in 1997, and later at The Los Angeles Times, where he was Seattle bureau chief, Mr. Tizon (pronounced TEA-zahn) was admired as a prose stylist and was known for long, deeply reported articles.
He wrote of his own life in “Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self.” In the book, he addressed many of the stereotypes he had internalized as an Asian-American, having experienced them “as a set of suspicions that seemed corroborated by everyday life.”
Subscribe to With Interest
Catch up and prep for the week ahead with this newsletter of the most important business insights, delivered Sundays.
Sign Up
Advertisement
“When did this shame inside me begin?” he wrote. “Looking back now, I could say it began with love. Love of the gifted people and their imagined life; love of America, the sprawling idea of it, with its gilded tentacles reaching across the Pacific Ocean to wrap around the hearts of small brown people living small brown lives. It was a love bordering on worship, fueled by longing, felt most fervently by those like my parents who grew up with America in their dreams. The love almost killed us.”
Mr. Tizon’s memoir detailed his struggle to find masculine Asian role models in Western popular culture and his childhood attempts to make himself look whiter. He recalled dangling from trees to stretch his vertebrae and pinching his nose with a clothespin to narrow it.
You have 2 free articles remaining.
Subscribe to The Times
“‘Big Little Man’ is an unflinchingly honest, at times beautifully written, often discomforting examination of Tizon’s remarkable, yet thoroughly relatable, life,” Jay Caspian Kang wrote in The New York Times Book Review.
Mr. Tizon said in an online interview with The Boston Globe last year that he thought life had grown better for Asian-Americans.
“I have nephews who are just worldbeaters,” he said. “They read my book, and yeah, they can relate to some of it. But a sense of inferiority? No. That’s just not there.”
Alex Tizon, former Seattle Times reporter who won Pulitzer Prize, dies at 57
Originally published March 25, 2017 at 5:52 pm Updated May 17, 2017 at 2:30 pm
1 of 4 | Alex Tizon, center, at a journalism workshop in 1991 with fellow instructors, Gary Settle, at left, and Ignacio Lobos. Mr. Tizon... (Betty Udesen/The Seattle Times) More
Mr. Tizon was known for deeply reported, philosopher-type pieces that are becoming rarer in today’s fast-paced media cycle.
Share story
By Mike Rosenberg
Seattle Times business reporter
Alex Tizon, a journalist and professor who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting while at The Seattle Times and spent decades exposing untold stories of marginalized communities, has died at age 57.
Mr. Tizon died unexpectedly Thursday, of natural causes, at his home in Eugene, Oregon, according to his family and the University of Oregon, where he was working as an assistant professor of journalism.
Mr. Tizon was one of three Seattle Times reporters to win the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, for stories that exposed widespread corruption and inequalities in the federally sponsored housing program for Native Americans. The series, which documented how billions of dollars in taxpayer funds were helping wealthy people across the country live in mansions while tribes were housed in decrepit shacks, inspired reforms to the program.
Friends, colleagues and family members said Mr. Tizon was known as a deep listener who preferred to dive headfirst into complicated, long-form stories that are becoming rarer in today’s fast-paced media cycle. An introvert who spent hours alone brooding over deep issues like the meaning of his life, he would often take on seemingly simple stories and come back with complicated tales about humanity.
Related stories
Alex Tizon’s last story: My family’s slave
Editor’s note: A reporter’s final story
‘Lola’ Pulido lived life of devotion to family (2011 obituary)
Why the obituary for Eudocia Tomas Pulido didn’t tell the story of her life in slavery
“He was very curious about other people — and learning about other people helped him learn about himself,” said his wife, Melissa Tizon. “That’s what journalism did for him. His whole life quest was about trying to understand who he was, as an immigrant growing up in a largely white community.”
Born in the Philippines, Mr. Tizon immigrated to Seattle with his family when he was 5 years old and bounced around the country before he settled back here.
Most Read Local Stories
Warning issued after at least 3 high schoolers in King County die from fentanyl-laced pills
Free to check in, but not to leave: Patients seeking mental-health treatment in Washington have been held against their will | Times Watchdog VIEW
How Seattle hotelier Ambassador Gordon Sondland made himself a central figure in Trump-Ukraine controversy
Man dies after shooting at Federal Way parking lot
East Coast sanitation-worker strike halts trash pickup in Western Washington cities
He spent 17 years at The Seattle Times before becoming the Seattle bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times from 2003 to 2008. He also contributed to publications like Newsweek and programs such as “60 Minutes.”
He then spent two years in Manila, where he helped track efforts by the government to eliminate poverty in poor communities, and taught workshops in far-flung locales like Romania. And he wrote a memoir, “Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self,” about the challenges of being an Asian-American man in the United States.
He turned to teaching in 2011, but his passion for writing still burned.
A year ago, he revived a story he began working on at the Los Angeles Times a decade before, about an Alaskan family whose son had disappeared. People go missing there all the time — about 3,000 a year at one point — but in the remote corner of the world, it garners little attention or news coverage.
The family had learned that authorities had found remains that might provide closure to their grief. Mr. Tizon flew to the tiny town to write a lengthy magazine piece for The Atlantic on the family’s struggles and the broader phenomenon of why so many people vanish in that state.
Those who worked with Mr. Tizon said the story was emblematic of his career — the way he spent so much time deeply reporting the piece, and the fact that he chose a topic that others in the media likely would have ignored.
“He had a real interest in marginal characters and people who had not been in the spotlight,” said his editor on The Atlantic piece, Denise Wills. “He almost became a member of the extended family for these people.”
In an interview last year, Mr. Tizon told the Harvard journalism program: “The stories I work on, especially for any length of time, do tend to become personal to me.”
Jacqui Banaszynski, a University of Missouri journalism professor who was Mr. Tizon’s editor for two years at The Seattle Times, echoed others who said his death was a loss to the journalism community. She recalled Mr. Tizon as “an almost philosopher essayist” in his approach, and that the paper would send him on stories that were complex and needed to be told at a deeper level than the standard news story.
A day after Sept. 11, 2001, for instance, the paper sent Mr. Tizon and photographer Alan Berner out for a series of several lengthy vignettes from various parts of the country that chronicled how communities were coping with the fallout of the terror attacks.
“We need more people doing the kind of work he learned how to do, telling those authentic, true stories, rather than just race-and-chase journalism,” Banaszynski said.
Mr. Tizon had a profound impact on other reporters, as well.
Lisa Heyamoto remembers starting out as a summer intern at The Seattle Times in 2001, sitting at the desk across from Mr. Tizon.
“I was just this flush-faced kid and was so hungry to get better and Alex paid attention to my work, and gave me feedback and clarified a lot of things for journalism for me at a time when I was really hungry and really impressionable,” Heyamoto said. “It made a huge impact on me, and I never forgot it.”
Heyamoto, who later got full-time reporting jobs at The Seattle Times and The Sacramento Bee and worked alongside Mr. Tizon when the two were instructors at Oregon, said that whenever she got writer’s block she would reread a 2000 story by Mr. Tizon called “Thom Jones and the Cosmic Joke,” about a former school janitor in Lacey who became a celebrated but tortured writer. It turned a fairly simple story into a broader piece about suffering and life choices.
“It reminded me of what you can do with a seemingly small story. He can tell this unsung story, and that’s a service to journalism, and a service to humanity,” said Heyamoto. “I modeled myself after him.”
As a professor, his colleagues said he ditched the PowerPoint-and-lecture style and simply got up and told stories.
He had a deep interest in fight clubs and boxing, and was an avid outdoorsman.
His family was in Eugene on Saturday still trying to figure out what happened. His death was so unexpected that they had been making plans for the summer, and Mr. Tizon had a piece in The Atlantic that was set for publication after fact-checking.
“He had more stories in him, he had another book in him,” Melissa Tizon said.
Besides his wife, Mr. Tizon is survived by two daughters, Dylan, 26, and Maya, 17, as well as eight siblings.
A memorial service will be at 1 p.m. on Saturday, April 1, at the Newport Covenant Church in Bellevue. The family says flowers can be sent there, or donations can be made to the Asian American Journalists Association.
Mike Rosenberg: mrosenberg@seattletimes.com or 206-464-2266; on Twitter @ByRosenberg.
QUOTED: "a memorable collection that shows how much journalism lost with the early death of one of its finest."
Tizon, Alex INVISIBLE PEOPLE Temple Univ. Press (Adult Nonfiction) $25.00 11, 22 ISBN: 978-1-4399-1830-2
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tizon (Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self, 2014) honors undersung lives in a posthumously published collection.
As a reporter, Tizon (1959-2017) gravitated toward misfits, eccentrics, and outsiders, all of whom he treats with acute sensitivity in this roundup of articles originally published between 1994 and 2017. Two autobiographical pieces form the book's moral center: an excerpt from his memoir of being Filipino American and the bittersweet June 2017 Atlantic cover story, "My Family's Slave," a loving portrait of a woman who worked for his family as a de facto indentured servant. The other entries consist of newspaper articles demonstrating the wide range of Tizon's sympathies, rooted in his belief that everyone has an "epic story" to tell. This thread ran through all his stories, whether he was writing about the only Muslim family in a Wyoming town after 9/11 or the descendants of a chief of the Nisqually tribe who fought to exonerate an ancestor they saw as unjustly hanged by the authorities. Most of the author's subjects exemplify broader cultural issues, none more heartbreakingly than the story of a Cambodian widow who saw her parents killed by Khmer Rouge soldiers, which reveals both her implacable grief and American psychiatrists' lack of preparation for dealing with trauma of that magnitude. More upbeat pieces include "Onward Christian Surfers," about missionaries on Waikiki Beach, and a profile of "a full-time UFO investigator and possessor of one of the world's most comprehensive, though unofficial UFO databases." Skillfully chosen by Verhovek, all of the pieces have brief introductions by fellow journalists or others. The collection lacks the articles for which Tizon shared a Pulitzer with two Seattle Times co-workers, but they remain available on the paper's website, and many people will want to seek them out after reading this book.
A memorable collection that shows how much journalism lost with the early death of one of its finest.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Tizon, Alex: INVISIBLE PEOPLE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A599964244/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0efcb639. Accessed 7 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A599964244
QUOTED: "will come away from this collection with an appreciation for his unquestionable ability to narrate unusual stories in memorable ways."
Invisible People: Stories of Lives at the Margins
Alex Tizon, edited by Sam Howe Verhovek.
Temple Univ., $25 (264p) ISBN 978-1-4399-1830-2
This collection of pieces by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tizon (Little Big Man) is both an introduction to his work and a heartfelt tribute by friends and colleagues, who contribute introductions to each article. Standouts include a profile of a Hurricane Karrina refugee who started a new life in Alaska; an entry on the post-9/11 experiences of the only Muslim family in Sheridan, Wyo.; a story about the historical court of inquiry that overturned the 1858 murder conviction of Chief Leschi, the last leader of the Nisqually Indians; and the controversial posthumous Atlantic article for which Tizon (1959-2017) is probably best known, "My Family's Slave." It tells the story of Eudocia Tomas Pulido, a Filipina woman who spent her life caring for the author's mother and her family after having been pressed into involuntary servitude as a young girl, eulogizing her and considering his own youthful complicity in her exploitation. Given that it's a celebration of Tizon's work, the collection highlights the praise the piece received and nearly ignores the controversy. Despite that, both longtime fans and those relatively new to Tizon's work will come away from this collection with an appreciation for his unquestionable ability to narrate unusual stories in memorable ways. (Nov.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Invisible People: Stories of Lives at the Margins." Publishers Weekly, 19 Aug. 2019, p. 85. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A597616474/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=053dc700. Accessed 7 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A597616474