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Reviews tagging 'Xenophobia'
Spirit Run: A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America's Stolen Land by Noé Álvarez
2 reviews
hannahpings's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
3.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Colonisation, Injury/Injury detail, Classism, Bullying, Deportation, Dysphoria, Medical content, Racism, and Xenophobia
Moderate: Addiction, Misogyny, and Sexism
Minor: Death, Drug use, Child death, Car accident, Kidnapping, and Pregnancy
corriejn's review against another edition
medium-paced
3.75
I got 3/4 through this book and gave up on it. I really wanted to be into it, and it even started out promising, but by that point I could not force myself through the last bit. I found it fairly randomly (looking for a currently-available nonfiction book through my library app, while waiting on several of my holds to become available), and was really interested to hear about this across-continent relay run to promote Indigenous peace and dignity (which I hadn't previously heard about, despite it apparently occurring every 4 years). The portions of the book in which the narrator tells stories of his own childhood, teenage years, and family life, and the small portions in which he shares the stories of others he encounters during this process, are the most compelling and authentic-feeling parts of the memoir. The descriptions of the run itself are disheartening-- it sounds like an incredibly poorly-organized and demonstrably unsafe pet project run by several truly toxic and outright abusive men. The author's flowery descriptions of his spiritual revelations during the run read as forced and out of line with his tone and voice throughout the rest of the book. The text is not especially well-written, particularly in the portions about the run, frequently including offhand mention of details that sound like they're going to be part of a story that is picked up later, but then are not mentioned again/finished. The text as a whole ends up giving the feeling that the author is a working-class Mexican-American version of that privileged kid from "Into The Wild"-- quitting college and setting out on a poorly-prepared adventure to find himself in nature.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Toxic relationship, Toxic friendship, Emotional abuse, and Bullying
Moderate: Cultural appropriation, Racism, and Xenophobia
Minor: Drug use and Violence
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