Anyone who has read Richard Rodriguez's Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father (1992) knows that this maverick editor of the Pacific News Service in San Francisco and a contributing editor for Harper's magazine has a sharp mind and a love of paradox. He goes against the grain by bursting the bubble that the media and the Census Bureau have foisted upon us by asserting: "To say, today, that Hispanics are becoming America's largest minority is to mock history, to pervert language, to dilute the noun 'minority' until it means little more than a population segment. This is exactly what Hispanics have become — a population segment, an ad-agency target audience, a market share. Not coincidentally, it was an advertising agency that got the point of the Hispanic totals as early as the 1980s. It was then that Coors Beer erected billboards throughout the Southwest that flattered 'The Decade of the Hispanic.' "

Growing up in Sacramento, California, during the 1950s, Richard Rodriguez called himself a scholarship boy. He emulated Benjamin Franklin who got up early every morning with the self-improving question "What good shall I do this day?" The author sees a bit of the same do-gooder in Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. Rodriguez moves on to a tribute to Richard Nixon who was the American icon of hard work, effort, and pluck paying off. He rooted for the sweaty graduate of Whittier College in the debate with John F. Kennedy. Rodriguez's conclusion: "Harvard College will always beat Whittier College in America. The game is fixed and there is nothing to be done about it."

It is this kind of going-against-the-grain that makes Brown such an invigorating read. Rodriguez offers the same kind of outrageous and culturally probing assessment of Canada, cell phone users, Mexico, categories in book stores, Ernest Shackleton, and much more. With great panache the author concludes: "Hispanicity is culture. Not Blood. Not race. A belief that the dead have a hold on the living."