An innovative, artful collection of diverse, undocumented voices.
A genre-crossing anthology of work by undocumented or formerly undocumented writers who migrated to the U.S.
In this collection, edited by Grande and Guiñansaca—self-described migrants from Mexico and Ecuador, respectively—diverse voices and experiences converge around common themes. An undocumented writer from Brazil, for example, conflates weight loss with the safety of invisibility from authorities and control over her precarious life, while an undocumented Mexican American learns how to ski to hide her status from her Wall Street colleagues. A Bangladeshi immigrant remembers the nightmares they had while undocumented, and a Mexican immigrant dreams of a lost friend as she negotiates her trans identity. Poets from Ethiopia and Iran remember escaping structural violence, while a Nigerian American immigrant writes about the emotional violence she faced in her new American home. Several of the pieces purposefully subvert the narrative of American exceptionalism, most notably an essay penned by a Mexican deportee who wonders whether, after her entry ban expires, she wants to return to the U.S. The work is expertly curated, encompassing not only a variety of races and ethnicities, but also a wide swath of sexual and gender identities. Several of the pieces are formally inventive, including “& I Came the Way Birds Came,” by Jennif(f)er Tamayo, who artfully redacts sections of her narrative in a style that invokes government censorship; and Bo Thai’s “Where Do We Go,” a work of striking visual art. Although no compilation can ever capture every immigrant experience, this expansive text captures more than most, incorporating exciting new voices with more established ones and representing a truly kaleidoscopic range of lives. Though several pieces don’t rise to the level of the others, this is an important, instructive book. Viet Thanh Nguyen provides the foreword.
An innovative, artful collection of diverse, undocumented voices.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-309577-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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