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ANTS AMONG ELEPHANTS

Name: ANTS AMONG ELEPHANTS
Author: Sujatha Gidla
ISBN: 978-0-86547-811-4

AN UNTOUCHABLE FAMILY AND THE MAKING OF MODERN INDIA

by Sujatha Gidla ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 18, 2017

Students of civil rights activism and South Asian societies will find much of value in Gidla’s far-ranging narrative, dense...

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Firsthand account of the lives of people categorized as the lowest of the low in India’s caste system.

Trained as a physicist, the daughter of teachers, Gidla is nonetheless an untouchable, which she describes as something like the racism African-Americans are forced to endure; though it is not built on identifiable markers such as skin color, it is nonetheless a pervasive indignity. “Because your life is your caste,” she writes, “your caste is your life.” Yet, as her narrative demonstrates, it is possible to slip around the caste system by becoming something even more untouchable than an untouchable: namely, an outlaw, and in the case of Gidla’s uncle Satyamurthy, the founder of “a Maoist guerrilla group recently declared by the government to be the single greatest threat to India’s security.” Charming and clever, SM, as he is known, is still committed to revolution even in old age, given to disappearing in the jungle to fight and organize. Another uncle, who also figures in the author’s account, escaped from the weight of untouchability with the help of alcohol, which felled him before he could fully contribute his memories to her narrative. That searching family history reaches back into a past in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, where, even in the 1800s, her ancestors were living as nomads who “worshipped their own tribal goddesses and had little to do with society outside the forest where they lived.” When enfolded by caste society, though without caste themselves, they became untouchable, meaning, literally, that any contact would defile even the lowest-caste Hindu. That system of belief, writes Gidla, affected every aspect of their lives, determining where they could live and how they could work, so much so that even in his revolutionary movement, SM had to field questions of caste at every turn.

Students of civil rights activism and South Asian societies will find much of value in Gidla’s far-ranging narrative, dense with detail and anecdote.

Pub Date: July 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-86547-811-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.