A luminous book that highlights the humanity and multitudes of being Asian American.
A timely collection that captures a wide variety of Asian American coming-of-age experiences.
Compiled amid the anti-Asian violence that began in 2020, the anthology shows that the Asian American experience is not monolithic but rather layered and diverse. Yet all readers will find much to relate to via universal themes of intergenerational conflict, stereotypes, and what it means to belong. Malaysian Chinese immigrant Shing Yin Khor’s “I Don’t Want To Write Today” is a gorgeously illustrated short story that captures the author’s exhaustion at having to make a case to exist, especially within a White-dominated culture. Novelist Melissa de la Cruz’s “Fourteen Ways of Being Asian in America Over Thirty-Six Years” chronicles her life from being a young girl from the Philippines to growing in her career as a writer; the one sad constant has been racism and microaggressions. Journalist Amna Nawaz grippingly depicts the fear she felt after 9/11 as a young Pakistani American and how that has shaped how she raises her biracial daughters in today’s culture. Besides the dual identities of being Asian and American, the book explores intersectionality in other aspects. “On Being Black and Asian in America,” by Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence, is about how her Japanese and Black identity changes with different social situations. Kim Tran’s “An Incomplete Silence” explores the author’s relationship with her family and how her mother’s silence when she came out did not necessarily mean disapproval. Other writers choose song lyrics (“Listen Asshole” by Yellow Rage) and poetry (“a bad day” by Catzie Vilayphonh, “Ten Things You Should Know About Being an Asian From the South” by G Yamazawa) to convey their anger at anti-Asian violence and the feeling of being a perpetual foreigner. Marie Lu’s poem, “Museum in Her Head,” describes a woman heroine walking through halls of memories and realizing the power of pride in one’s work and name. SuChin Pak provides the introduction, and other contributors include Kao Kalia Yang, David Kwong, and Aisha Sultan.
A luminous book that highlights the humanity and multitudes of being Asian American.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982195-37-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: MTV Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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