A potent lesson in empathy that is all the more powerful for never presenting itself as a lesson.
A “collective refugee memoir” that serves as an object lesson in the utility of creative nonfiction.
In the prologue, Yang describes wanting to write this book years ago but feeling like she was not yet ready as a writer. Whether she was correct in her self-assessment then, she’s certainly up to the job now. This is a work of technical as well as empathetic mastery. The narrative consists of a series of stories of refugees who have ended up in Minnesota, Yang’s home state. (The author is a Hmong refugee who was born in a Thai refugee camp after her parents fled Laos.) Her subjects’ origins are global but cluster primarily in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The stories are as powerful as they are unique, and Yang makes the wise decision to get out of the way and let her subjects express themselves. For example, Awo talks about her weekly calls home to Somalia: “Every Saturday, in those conversations, they become a full family: a mother, a father, and their children, voices celebrating their gratitude for each other’s safety and small successes. Each is reminded of the immense love in their lives, a love that survives unimaginable distance.” Throughout, the author’s straight-ahead, declarative sentences can’t conceal that her presence is all over this book. Her immersively descriptive language is reminiscent of her two previous memoirs, The Latehomecomer and The Song Poet, and her delicate touch allows us to see what is right in front of us: luck. If we are not refugees, we might have been. If our lives have been relatively stable, they may not remain so. “The people in this book are people going through this storm with us all on this very night,” she writes near the end. She is addressing her own children, but she is speaking to the rest of us as well.
A potent lesson in empathy that is all the more powerful for never presenting itself as a lesson.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-29685-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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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