A beautifully written memoir that offers familiar calls for political resistance but little in-depth political analysis.
Debut author and community organizer Prabasi reflects on a life spent in Nepal and Ethiopia and on the disconcerting political environment that she found in the United States.
When the Netherlands-born author’s family moved to Nepal, she was in the fifth grade and could speak but neither read nor write the native language. She attended an American international school in Kathmandu and later moved to the United States to attend college. While visiting Ethiopia, she fell deeply in love with its “vast expanses, its diversity of landscape and languages,” and its coffee, too, which is a prized part of the culture. There, she also met her future husband, Elias, and gave birth to her first child, but she became concerned about the country’s “controlling and authoritarian political system” and decided to move to New York City for a safer, freer life and greater opportunity. The author and her spouse wanted to start a business, so they opened Café Buunni in 2012, just over a year after they’d landed in the city. Later, Prabasi was shocked by Donald Trump’s coarse campaign for the presidency—she became an American citizen just in time to vote in the 2016 election—and she became anxious that the country where she’d made her home was quickly becoming inhospitable to immigrants and people of color. The author’s impressionistic account of her travels is poetically thoughtful, and she has a keen eye for granular detail, which she evokes in delicate, vivid language. Also, she offers an inspiring tale of community-based political action; her cafe participated in a fundraiser for the American Civil Liberties Union, which will remind some older readers of decades past, when cafes were hotbeds of political organization. However, others may find her frenzied depiction of the United States following Trump’s election to be hyperbolic, as she describes a country that seems solely defined by its “racism, the white supremacy, the gun violence, the war economy, the individualism taken to extremes that leaves little room for empathy or compassion.”
A beautifully written memoir that offers familiar calls for political resistance but little in-depth political analysis.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73285-403-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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