An account of the American dream gone wrong that alternates wildly between the troubling and the uplifting.
An immigrant struggles with health and employment issues before finding hope in her faith.
Born and raised with six siblings in Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America, debut author Edwards and her family immigrated to New York in the mid 1980s in search of prosperity. Instead, her educated parents, who were soundly middle class in Guyana, found themselves working menial jobs as nannies and security guards—a cycle of underemployment that Edwards herself would confront after graduating from college and moving to Atlanta. For years, she would seek a job as a copy editor to no avail: “Surely, I was qualified and skilled to work in my field, but somehow nothing opened up.” Edwards soon set her mind to moving to Florida, but before she could actualize her vision of a sunnier, happier existence as a teacher, she found a lump in her left breast. Without health insurance, she sought local clinics to have a lumpectomy but went more than a year with no follow-up visits. Although she created a new life in Florida, it was marred by horrible students and a cancer that had spread through her bones. By the book’s end, Edwards discovers support and relief in her Christian faith, but her story always returns to the many disappointments she suffered in the United States. “The rules of the game had changed,” she writes of the American dream, “and I evidently never got an update.” The theme of an immigrant’s plans becoming derailed by timely social issues like health insurance and hiring freezes should resonate strongly with readers. But Edwards never fleshes out her recollection. It remains unclear if she intends her story to be an American tragedy or a Christian tale of triumph filled with traumatic elements. Her tendency to use verbose, academic language also gets in the way of clarifying her objective (“I considered the entrapment of being in a cultural dichotomy where younger immigrants contended with the dissonance of living through our parents’ worldview or adopting that of the new world”). In addition, truly upsetting moments—like her decision to shrug off the cancer destroying her body or the sudden, unexplained death of her brother—certainly don’t help to guide this memoir, which is in great need of a clearer direction.
An account of the American dream gone wrong that alternates wildly between the troubling and the uplifting.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5127-1269-8
Page Count: 70
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2017
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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