Heartfelt essays from vibrant American voices.
Writers from diverse ethnic backgrounds ring in on American identity.
Actor and activist Ferrera makes her book debut as editor of this collection of spunky, fresh, and often moving personal essays responding to the question: What do I call an American like me? Because she grew up believing she was “alone in feeling stuck between cultures,” Ferrera sees the book as a way to foster a sense of belonging as well as to celebrate difference. “We live as citizens of a country that does not always claim us or even see us,” she writes, “and yet, we continue to build, to create, and to compel it toward its own promise.” That promise beckoned many writers’ parents or grandparents to make an arduous journey to a new homeland. “For my family,” writes Olympic figure skater Michelle Kwan, “the American dream wasn’t just a fairy-tale notion or a meaningless phrase. It has always been real and extremely motivating.” Hoping for a bright future for themselves and their children, Kwan’s parents left China, arriving in the U.S. penniless and knowing no English but certain that “if you work hard and take big risks for what you believe in, you can accomplish anything.” They sacrificed time and money to support Kwan’s passion for ice skating. Other writers include comedians Al Madrigal and Kumail Nanjiani, cookbook author and TV host Padma Lakshmi, transgender advocate Geena Rocero, NBA player Jeremy Lin, actor and documentary filmmaker Ravi Patel, gymnast Laurie Hernandez, and composer and playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda. Some, bullied and mocked as children, wanted to blend into white America, begging for white-bread sandwiches rather than curry in their lunchboxes. Others flaunted their difference. Growing up in Houston, actress Liza Koshy liked “being racially ambiguous. Forever the ethnically mysterious little brown girl.” She saw her Asian and Latino friends not as a melting pot but a salad bowl, “tossed haphazardly together” to produce “something delicious,” each contributing a “special flavor or texture.”
Heartfelt essays from vibrant American voices.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8091-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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