Provocative and mostly thought-provoking essays.
A Chinese-American professor and writer reflects on the social and cultural ramifications of his ethnic identity.
In this collection of essays, Gee (English/Georgia Coll.) engagingly probes his thoughts about living as a man of Chinese origin in the United States. Feeling different from other Americans was a constant of his life that began in childhood. Representations of Asian people he saw on TV and in the world “failed to correspond with who [he] was.” Forced to deal with Chinese stereotypes—such as math geek and music prodigy—Gee had to defend his right “to belong,” even among other nonwhites. But being considered a “model minority” didn’t always equate to better treatment. He tells the story of how a state trooper assumed criminal intent on his part because of what he looked like. At the same time, his Chinese background was also a source of fascination and even desire. Gee recalls how a young white woman asked him to a dinner and then later invited him to sleep with her. “She wasn’t interested in me as much as the idea of me,” he writes, “…based on the hue of my skin and shape of my eyes.” Cultivating visibility and nonviolent means of retaliation against all forms of anti-Asian racism is crucial. In one essay, Gee celebrates the efforts of a young man who, in 2011, combated a white student’s video rant against Asian students in the UCLA library. Commenting on the fact that he is part of a tiny Asian minority in his small town of Milledgeville, Georgia, where he lives and works, Gee remarks that his presence—like that of Chinese-American NBA star Jeremy Lin, whom he discusses elsewhere—is not just a defiant marker of difference. It is also a reminder that he is “part of the grand experiment in democracy” that is America.
Provocative and mostly thought-provoking essays.Pub Date: May 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-939650-30-6
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Santa Fe Writers Project
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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