Roll Down Your Window: Stories of a Forgotten America

Columnist Gonzales, left-wing and Puerto Rican, enlivens New York's tabloid Daily News with his sympathy and sensitivity for ``the outcast neighborhoods from which I came.'' This book, composed of excerpts from some of Gonzalez's best work, captures the brio of the daily dispatch but lacks the sustained focus that a book should provide. A union activist himself at the paper, Gonzalez knows the vital dignity of labor, writing about struggling and suffering workers in New York, Honduras and Haiti. Along with vignettes from New York and the Los Angeles riots, Gonzalez tracks the Honduran victims of a tragic New York fire and the underreported murder of Manuel de Dios Unanue, a Spanish-language journalist whose probes of Colombia's Cali drug cartel cost him his life. A skeptical witness of U.S. policies, Gonzalez visited Haiti and Cuba, emerging with disdain for the Clinton administration, though its policy toward Cuba is hardly different from those of its predecessors, and offering portraits of the ordinary folk trying to better their lives. Author tour. (Nov.)