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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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