Tenderly balanced, deeply insightful writing with a few minor flaws.
In this frank debut memoir, Rajeev outlines the difficulties of growing up in America as the daughter of Indian immigrants.
“My father was so upset that I was born a girl, he literally became mad at God,” reflects Rajeev who was born in Queens in 1990. Being a daughter meant that she was not only “unwanted,” but “born without a voice.” The author seeks to understand her heritage, accomplish the dreams her parents abandoned, and find a voice of her own. She starts by recalling her father’s arrival in the United States—a boat worker who entered the country as an undocumented immigrant by jumping ship in New Orleans. She recounts his struggle to obtain a green card after venturing to New York and how her mother gave birth to her while in the U.S. on a visitor visa. Rajeev explains the precariousness of the immigrant experience, which often depends on the kindness of strangers. She describes enduring racism, particularly after 9/11, and some of her triumphs, including earning her doctorate in sociology. Rajeev’s writing provides a fresh, forthright catalog of the demands placed on immigrant families, which are “always compromising their wellbeing, whether that be mental or physical, to provide structure to their family.” The author’s balanced viewpoint considers her parents’ hidden pain as well as her own: “He was ok with having his daughter hate him. He hated himself right now too.” Rajeev places significant emphasis on her father’s experiences, which are integral to her story, but in a memoir that explores female subjugation, some readers may expect the narrative to be framed with women as a priority. Also, the dialogue, which is presented in script form, is bland, and would benefit from being integrated into the text: “Other kids: You’re Indian? Me: Yes. Other kids: So, you must be really smart. Me: I don’t know.” Still, this is a valuable unpacking of Indian immigrant life—its restrictions and possibilities—from the perspective of an astute author.
Tenderly balanced, deeply insightful writing with a few minor flaws.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5445-1716-2
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.
A writer’s journey to find himself.
In January 2015, French novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and memoirist Carrère began a 10-day meditation retreat in the Morvan forest of central France. For 10 hours per day, he practiced Vipassana, “the commando training of meditation,” hoping for both self-awareness and material for a book. “I’m under cover,” he confesses, planning to rely on memory rather than break the center’s rule forbidding note taking. Long a practitioner of tai chi, the author saw yoga, too, as a means of “curtailing your ego, your greed, your thirst for competition and conquest, about educating your conscience to allow it unfiltered access to reality, to things as they are.” Harsh reality, however, ended his stay after four days: A friend had been killed in a brutal attack at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, and he was asked to speak at his funeral. Carrère’s vivid memoir, translated by Lambert—and, Carrère admits, partly fictionalized—covers four tumultuous years, weaving “seemingly disparate” experiences into an intimate chronicle punctuated by loss, desperation, and trauma. Besides reflecting on yoga, he reveals the recurring depression and “erratic, disconnected, unrelenting” thoughts that led to an unexpected diagnosis; his four-month hospitalization in a psychiatric ward, during which he received electroshock therapy; his motivation for, and process of, writing; a stay on the Greek island of Leros, where he taught writing to teenage refugees, whose fraught journeys and quiet dreams he portrays with warmth and compassion; his recollection of a tsunami in Sri Lanka, which he wrote about in Lives Other Than My Own; an intense love affair; and, at last, a revival of happiness. Carrère had planned to call his yoga book Exhaling, which could serve for this memoir as well: There is a sense of relief and release in his effort to make sense of his evolving self.
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60494-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
This is a man who has seen it all, and he sure does know how to tell a story.
Fighting back against a nearly fatal health crisis, a renowned foreign correspondent reviews his career.
New York Times journalist Nordland, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has reported from more than 150 countries. Working in Delhi on July 4, 2019, he had a seizure and lost consciousness. At that point, he began his “second life,” one defined by a glioblastoma multiforme tumor. “From 3 to 6 percent of glioblastoma patients are cured; one of them will bear my name,” writes the author, while claiming that the disease “has proved to be the best thing that ever happened to me.” From the perspective of his second life, which marked the end of his estrangement from his adult children, he reflects on his first, which began with a difficult childhood in Philadelphia. His abusive father was a “predatory pedophile.” His mother, fortunately, was “astonishingly patient and saintly,” and Nordland and his younger siblings stuck close together. After a brief phase of youthful criminality, the author began his career in journalism at the Penn State campus newspaper. Interspersing numerous landmark articles—some less interesting than others, but the best are wonderful—Nordland shows how he carried out the burden of being his father’s son: “Whether in Bosnia or Kabul, Cambodia or Nigeria, Philadelphia or Baghdad, I always seemed to gravitate toward stories about vulnerable people, especially women and children—since they will always be the most vulnerable in any society—being exploited or mistreated by powerful men or powerful social norms.” Indeed, some of the stories reveal the worst in human nature. A final section, detailing his life since his diagnosis in chapters such as “I Forget the Name of This Chapter: On Memory,” wraps up the narrative with humor, candor, and reflection.
This is a man who has seen it all, and he sure does know how to tell a story.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780063096226
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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