Quirky, often relatable workplace riffing, although its grievances aren’t always persuasive.
In this debut memoir, a Trinidad-born engineer/programmer shares stories of discrimination and absurdity during his U.S. career.
“Whatever happened to standard operating procedures for hiring?” Aaron says several times in this memoir, a collection of anecdotes about his perplexing experiences in corporate America. A native of Trinidad, he earned an MBA and a Master of Science in Engineering in industrial and operations engineering, both from the University of Michigan, in the late 1970s. Although he was clearly as accomplished as other job candidates, he says that he often encountered outright racism; one interviewer turned red in his presence because, Aaron says, he was “not used to outstanding black students, especially one from a poor-ass third-world country.” Recruiters and managers weirdly focused on his Caribbean education credentials rather than on “what I did at Michigan and afterwards.” He also relates an array of other head-scratching incidents, including taking a test for a job and getting a rejection letter nearly instantaneously. Aaron paraphrases pop-music lyrics throughout his narrative, including a chapter titled “What Does My High School Name Got To Do, Got to Do With It,” a reference to the persistent puzzlement about his Caribbean high school being called a “College.” He also uses many abbreviations and acronyms to make fun of and/or mask managers’ and companies’ names (such as a hiring manager he calls “JW—Just Wrong”). The book concludes with facsimile pages of his transcripts and diplomas. Aaron’s feelings of anger, confusion, and bemusement about his treatment in the workplace will certainly resonate with many readers. He thankfully keeps his tales on the short side, providing about 60 quick stories that offer an engaging scope of experiences. Their tone ranges from Office Space–type ridiculous to truly disheartening. However, some of Aaron’s complaints seem one-sided and incomplete; it seems quite understandable, for example, that employers would be hesitant to hire him before he had his green card.
Quirky, often relatable workplace riffing, although its grievances aren’t always persuasive.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4809-1053-9
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2016
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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