A fun, inspirational work about a gutsy expatriate’s life overseas.
In this debut memoir, a young American college graduate moves to Singapore and lands a plush job with Toyota.
As this memoir opens, Hilary Corna is a peripatetic in the making. At 21, with two bachelor’s degrees—in international business and Asian studies—she sells her only asset, a 1995 Jeep Wrangler, walks away from her longtime boyfriend and gives herself two months to make it in Singapore. Her drinking buddy’s father lives there, and he invites her to stay with him while she navigates the foreign terrain and job market. A serendipitous poolside encounter with a Toyota executive named Sato alters the course of her life. Impressed with her knowledge of Japanese (she spent a summer in Japan) and her gumption to succeed, he offers her an interview at Toyota Motor Asia Pacific. Corna’s ecstatic when she’s hired as an executive officer, a job that centers on the Japanese concept of kaizen, or “change for the better.” Her goal: to improve the quality and efficiency of area Toyota dealerships. At Toyota, she’s often the only female, the only American and the only person under 30. Over the next three years, Corna grows and matures as she adapts to a bevy of cultural shocks; she learns to tame her American outspokenness, eat exotic dishes such as shark’s fin soup, embrace the concept of modesty and adapt to Singapore’s oppressive heat. The author offers a vicarious ride through her years of wanderlust as she writes of her extensive business travel to India and the Philippines. Her story reads like a travelogue at times, as she offers informative tidbits about each country (India, for example, has more than 50 dialects). Her schedule doesn’t allow for a social life, although she manages a couple of trips home to Ohio. She enjoys brief romances abroad but misses her ex-boyfriend, her family and American companionship in general. The author provides engaging moments of light humor throughout, usually about her own social snafus. Loss is a constant theme, as her co-workers move on and her cherished mentor, “Sato-san,” moves to Italy. Her overall message is that sacrifice is painful but ultimately propitious: “People moving in and out of your life numbs you from emotional attachment.” In the end, however, her homesickness prevails, and she leaves Asia, wiser and worldlier.
A fun, inspirational work about a gutsy expatriate’s life overseas.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463699345
Page Count: 298
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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