{"id":3840,"date":"2024-05-01T15:00:12","date_gmt":"2024-05-01T21:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/?p=3840"},"modified":"2024-04-03T14:50:12","modified_gmt":"2024-04-03T20:50:12","slug":"book-the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao-2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/2024\/05\/01\/book-the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao-2007\/","title":{"rendered":"BOOK: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><u><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft \" src=\"https:\/\/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com\/images\/S\/compressed.photo.goodreads.com\/books\/1347644349i\/7809593.jpg\" alt=\"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao\" width=\"200\" height=\"194\" \/>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao<br \/>\n<\/u><\/strong>Year: 2007<br \/>\nAuthor: Junot Diaz<br \/>\nLength: 960 minutes \/ 16.00 hours<\/p>\n<p>I picked up this book because it was on a list of Pulitzer Prize winners and I figured that was a good enough metric to give it a shot. I was not disappointed. Told from a few different perspectives, <em>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao<\/em> is a fantastic look into the lives of Dominican Americans. I could tell the author was writing from deeply personal experiences, and the result was riveting.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a lot I don&#8217;t know about the Dominican culture, but I felt this book was an eye-opening look into their history. Told as personal anecdotes from the characters, it was wild to see the effects of living under a dictator. However, even once someone escaped from that oppression, life in America wasn&#8217;t an easy walk in the park either. The effects of racism might not be as bad as having your daughters sold to a dictator, but they still aren&#8217;t pretty. Using these point-of-view stories to convey all this made the experience of reading this book feel more authentic.<\/p>\n<p>This audiobook also included a short story by the same author, &#8220;Drown.&#8221; While this story wasn&#8217;t quite up to the quality of <em>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao<\/em>, a lot of the author&#8217;s style was still present. Of course, this style felt a little rougher than his Pulitzer Prize-winning work, but it was interesting to see how it evolved between the two. Ultimately, the Pulitzer Prize can be a somewhat subjective metric for whether a book is good or not. Here, it&#8217;s spot-on and I think people should read it because of its award-winning status.<\/p>\n<p>An excellent and authentic examination of the life of a Dominican American, I give <em>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao<\/em> 4.0 stars out of 5.<\/p>\n<h2><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\" \/>\u00a0<strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\" \/>\u00a0<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\" \/>\u00a0<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\" \/><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-full\"><a href=\"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/bmw-the-critic\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"820\" height=\"312\" src=\"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/BMW-the-Critic-v2.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2968\" srcset=\"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/BMW-the-Critic-v2.jpg 820w, https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/BMW-the-Critic-v2-300x114.jpg 300w, https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/BMW-the-Critic-v2-768x292.jpg 768w, https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/BMW-the-Critic-v2-640x244.jpg 640w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 820px) 100vw, 820px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Year: 2007 Author: Junot Diaz Length: 960 minutes \/ 16.00 hours I picked up this book because it was on a list of Pulitzer Prize winners and I figured that was a good enough metric to give it a shot. I was not disappointed. Told from a few [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,54],"tags":[176,55,3686,3687,1355,3688,8,3685],"class_list":["post-3840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-4-0-stars","category-book","tag-176","tag-book","tag-dominican-republic","tag-drown","tag-pulitzer","tag-pulitzer-prize","tag-review","tag-the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3840"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3843,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3840\/revisions\/3843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}