A book that makes its point over and over again without belaboring it.
As the title suggests, this book shows how profound and pervasive the immigrant influence has been on American life.
Scratch beneath the surface of nearly any facet of what is considered American culture, and you’ll likely find the imprint of someone who came to the country from somewhere else. Such is the lesson of this collaboration between novelist Nović (Girl at War, 2015), who was born and raised in America within an immigrant family, and illustrator Kolesar, who emigrated from Scotland. Here, they celebrate more than 200 individuals, with capsule biographies of no more than a page and full-color portraits that attest to the cultural diversity and vitality of the immigrant influence. “There are 193 member states in the United Nations; this book contains at least one person from each of them,” states the introduction. One two-page spread on “Classic American Products” pays tribute to those responsible for Levi’s, hamburgers, Nathan’s hot dogs, Carvel ice cream, and Chevrolet, all-American iconography that owes its genesis to Germany, Denmark, Poland, Greece, and Switzerland, respectively. The all-American Chef Boyardee was known in his native Italy as Ettore Boiardi. After the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, when he “famously quipped to his doctors, ‘Please tell me you’re Republicans,’ ” three members of his medical team were from Malaysia, “Nicaragua/Mexico,” and “a refugee of Nazi Germany…raised in an American orphanage.” Lest anyone think this is a work of partisan ideology, among those celebrated is “the only naturalized citizen ever to become First Lady, Melania Trump,” balanced a couple of pages later by Hungarian refugee and billionaire human rights activist George Soros. As the narrative clearly shows, from music to fine arts, from the stage to the big screen, from scientific discoveries to athletic records, the history of American culture is impossible to record without significant immigrant representation.
A book that makes its point over and over again without belaboring it.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984819-82-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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