Khan’s aspirational memoir reminds us all why Americans should welcome newcomers from all lands.
A politically pointed immigrant success story mingled with equally pointed tragedy.
A native of Pakistan, Khan thought of America as a land of cowboys—when, that is, he thought of anything other than enduring homegrown oppression. “If you have lived half of your life under martial law and the rest in a swirl of political chaos,” he writes meaningfully, “Western ideals aren’t readily in your orbit.” Those ideals came to him in the form of an encounter with the Declaration of Independence and its profession of equality and inalienable rights. He found his way to America and Harvard Law, reveling in the civil order that he found nothing short of marvelous while rediscovering the Islam of his birth in its tolerant mode, not the “brutal theocracy” that interpreted the religion back home. Khan, in short, charts the nuanced evolution of an American patriot, one whose son was killed by a car bomb while serving as an Army officer in Iraq. Capt. Humayan Saqib Muazzam Khan was proclaimed a hero and posthumously earned the Bronze Star and Purple Heart for bravery in combat, to which his father characteristically adds a small wrinkle: “My son was dead because he was trying to make sure a stranger wasn’t killed by mistake. He stayed true to the shape of his heart.” So, it seems, did the father, who became an earnest critic of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, berating him for his anti-immigrant agitation and his penchant for “stirring the worst of human nature.” All those credentials, of course, explain why Khan was asked to speak at the Democratic National Convention, introduced by his son’s hero, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and elevated to national attention in the bargain. Self-effacing, the author writes movingly of the events leading up to that moment, which he feared, correctly, might expose him to direct attack on the part of Trump himself.
Khan’s aspirational memoir reminds us all why Americans should welcome newcomers from all lands.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-59249-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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