A scrutiny of self-identity involving immense fortitude and bravery.
San Francisco-born Indian journalist Hajratwala offers a spirited journey through the extended Indian diaspora over the last century.
The author’s family hails from the same western region of India, Gujarat, as Gandhi, and she writes that her maternal grandfather participated in the Mahatma’s legendary Salt March of 1930. Hajratwala traces the staggering expanse of Indian emigration across the globe. By her account, 11.5 million Indians are now living abroad, from Fiji to Middlesex County in New Jersey. Her family name, “hazrat-waalaa,” means one who prophesies, and her family’s caste, the Kshatriya, places them among the warrior-kings, somewhere below priests but above merchants and laborers. Centered around five villages near Navsari, her family cluster branched out once the region’s weaving industry was no longer sustainable. Her great-grandfather Motiram emigrated to the Fiji Islands in 1909 and set up one of the largest department stores in the South Pacific, becoming a catalyst for other family members to leave India. His brothers established themselves in Johannesburg and Durban, South Africa. At the time, Indians were welcomed as much-needed labor, before a racist backlash erupted and apartheid was established, along with quotas and restrictions—also reflected in America in the ’20s, as the author ably shows. Hajratwala’s father was sent from Fiji to study pharmacology in America, as part of the “brain drain” of Third World intellectuals emigrating to the United States in the ’60s in search of greater economic opportunities. From an arranged marriage within the same caste, he and the author’s mother, a physiotherapist, settled in suburban Michigan, where the author grew up. Her work is a richly—occasionally tediously—detailed, rare study of Indian diaspora, and a pleasing mixture of sociopolitical journalism and intricately layered memoir.
A scrutiny of self-identity involving immense fortitude and bravery.Pub Date: March 18, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-618-25129-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
