Orange County: A Personal History: The Reviews

*Updated mucho times, inshallah...

My book is out--go to the signing this Thursday at the Yost--and a couple of reviews are trickling in, unlike the tsunami of praise weathered by my Scribner hermano, Chuck Klosterman. The good, the bad, and the estúpido below, along with memorable pull quotes!

*What's Up Weekly, the alt-weekly in El Paso: "a sly, if sometimes uneven, marriage of autobiography and civic history." Better one: "In these historical chapters, Arellano’s pen bleeds with righteous, light-hearted anger, exposing hypocrisies, recounting scandals and upending fallacies like a wisecracking, Spanglish-speaking Howard Zinn." Put that one on my tombstone, por favor.

*Pedro and the Watcher, blog/sometimes-column from the Orange County Register: The family portion of the book is "a fresh presentation of a common story for many in Orange County," but "The Orange County history is mostly stuff you already know if you’ve been paying attention, or presented through such a relentlessly negative lens that by the end of the book you wonder why, if he’s so appalled by the place, he didn’t move away years ago." And then gets more bitchy from there!

*Bibliocracy, KPFK-FM 90.7 show: "We see a young man reconcile with and even thrive in the place Ronald Reagan said good Republicans go to die, and get city profiles and restaurant reviews too!"

More as they come, God willing!