An intriguing but incomplete outsider’s tale of lethal ambition.
The trials of a young woman interning on Wall Street.
Godiwalla reveals what initially drove her from the suburbs of Houston to seek her fortune in one of the most high-stress, male-dominated work environments on the planet. The third child in a family of exceptionally bright, hardworking daughters, Godiwalla was raised by her first-generation Persian-Indian parents with the expectation that she would excel in school. Wishing to distinguish herself from her sisters, the author looked to Wall Street as the sole means to earning her father’s respect: “I became fixated on the idea that money would not only allow me to live by my own rules but also, down the road, win the love of my father, who was still in awe of the American dream—wealth and prestige.” And so the straight-A student set off for Wall Street, becoming the sole freshman from the University of Texas to undertake a summer internship at JP Morgan, where she quickly learned to lose “anything Southern or middle class.” Undaunted by the exclusive world of finance, Godiwalla returned to New York City the summer of her junior year to participate in Morgan Stanley’s highly selective Scholars program for minorities, which gave her access to the ultra-elite, high-powered world of Corporate Finance along with a six-figure salary to help pay off her student loans. It was here that the author found the horrifyingly sexist and classist environment untenably soul numbing. As with many tales of personal reformation, the real story—how Godiwalla walked away from Wall Street and eventually achieved her other dream of getting married—remains unexplored and is only hinted at in the end papers.
An intriguing but incomplete outsider’s tale of lethal ambition.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-934633-95-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atlas & Co.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
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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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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