A remarkable memoir about a young immigrant who becomes a successful engineer in the U.S. after years of hardship.
An Indian immigrant recalls his struggles to assimilate and build a career in America in the 1960s and ’70s.
In his debut memoir, Bedi relates the story of his tumultuous life. Coming to America by boat as a young man in 1961, he hoped to obtain a degree in engineering from the University of Tennessee. The author was eager to study in the U.S. because he did “not want to sell cloth” in his father’s small fabric shop in Punjab. But Bedi didn’t adjust well to university life, proceeding to fail his classes because he was more focused on “dating American girls” and working at McDonald’s to support himself. He transferred to Knoxville College and toiled at a series of odd jobs to fund his education. He took a position as a cook at a hotel in Wildwood, New Jersey, but because he had little culinary experience, he called a friend for advice on how to make pancakes. He even became a bus driver in Chicago. After five years in the U.S., Bedi received a bachelor’s degree in math, but his journey was far from over. He then concentrated on his “true goal”: earning a graduate degree in engineering from the University of Tennessee. The author is especially adept at relating the conflicts that came with his immigrant status in the ’60s. For instance, in college, a girlfriend’s mother angrily called to warn him that he should “stay away from my daughter if you know what’s good for you.” In another incident, he was nearly arrested because he didn’t understand that it was illegal to drive without a license. Throughout his vivid account, Bedi shows amazing resolve and determination in achieving his dreams. Readers will likely applaud the author as he skillfully narrates his many trials on the road to forging a stable life in his new home. This engrossing and timely book should appeal to anyone wishing to learn more about the immigrant experience in America.
A remarkable memoir about a young immigrant who becomes a successful engineer in the U.S. after years of hardship.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-943006-43-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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