This Indian bestseller will strike a chord in the U.S.
A loving paean to courageous parents, and an indicting portrait of prejudice in modern-day India.
Economist Jadhav grew up in a family of “Untouchables,” or, more properly, Dalits (literally the downtrodden, or the oppressed, a term used primarily to refer to those descended from Untouchables). Although the 1950 constitution outlawed the caste system, discrimination against Dalits still saturates India. “Over the years,” explains Jadhav, “the caste system has taken on sophisticated dimensions; it has become subtler, though no less pernicious.” Here, Jadhav tells the story of his parents—a hard-working pair who were determined that their son would have a better life. His father, Damu, recalls the day he learned he was an Untouchable. He was a small boy, walking in a village with his own father. Having grown thirsty under the hot son, Damu spied a vat of water that someone had left under a tree—and was told he was not allowed to drink from it. “[W]hen I looked back,” recalls Damu, “[a] dog was lapping up water from the same vat. That was the first time I wondered if it were better to be born a dog.” Inspired in part by the leadership of activist Babasaheb Ambedkar, who devoted his life to organizing the Untouchables and fighting for change in India, Damu began to question the caste system. Much of this—based in part on Jadhav’s father’s written reminiscences—is told in the first-person, with Jadhav’s parents narrating, a conceit that is, at first, distracting. Concluding chapters describe Jadhav’s education and professional success—and attest to the discrimination that dogged him even after he had earned a Ph.D. and garnered a prestigious job. An engaging afterword by Jadhav’s college-aged daughter carries the generational saga one step further.
This Indian bestseller will strike a chord in the U.S.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-7079-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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
