A candid and often moving history of a city’s dramatic past and roiling present.
The son of immigrant parents creates a vivid, affectionate, and gritty portrait of a complex city.
Born in America to Indian scientists who felt “torn between nation and vocation,” Choudhury grew up in New Jersey, taken twice for stays in India. Those experiences planted a seed of yearning, and in 2001, after graduating from Princeton, he went back to Calcutta to work as a reporter at the Statesman. Although he had planned to stay forever, enduring two monsoons changed his mind: he returned home and enrolled in a doctoral program in political science at Yale. Calcutta’s draw was seductive, though, and for his doctoral dissertation, he embarked on a yearlong study of the city. That study informs his literary debut, an insightful melding of family memoir, autobiography, and history that illuminates the politics, society, and culture of “dirty, disorderly, teeming” Calcutta. Until the 1970s, Choudhury writes, Calcutta was India’s largest city, an impressive manufacturing hub in the nation’s wealthiest state. But in the ensuing decades, the city declined drastically: silt piles made its river unnavigable, and unions killed manufacturing, leaving 45,000 acres of rusting factories. Yet what others deem “an urban hellhole” the author sees as a rich palimpsest of cultural memory, “an infinite regression of experiences of longing and loss.” Besides describing Calcutta’s thronging, cacophonous daily life, the author examines the dire consequences of British colonialism. “The lasting legacy of the British in Bengal was famine,” Choudhury reveals. In 1943, 3 million starved to death. The British mandate of partition incited fierce religious wars between Hindus and Muslims, forcing Bengals from their ancestral land. His own family suffered in the upheaval; millions were uprooted, arriving as refugees in Calcutta. Colonial rule left India deeply demoralized, believing itself doomed to “failure upon failure”: “failure to not spit and piss everywhere,” “failure to cover our drains, to provide clean drinking water or clinics or schools or the basics of a dignified life.”
A candid and often moving history of a city’s dramatic past and roiling present.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63557-156-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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