A beautifully written memoir that offers familiar calls for political resistance but little in-depth political analysis.
Debut author and community organizer Prabasi reflects on a life spent in Nepal and Ethiopia and on the disconcerting political environment that she found in the United States.
When the Netherlands-born author’s family moved to Nepal, she was in the fifth grade and could speak but neither read nor write the native language. She attended an American international school in Kathmandu and later moved to the United States to attend college. While visiting Ethiopia, she fell deeply in love with its “vast expanses, its diversity of landscape and languages,” and its coffee, too, which is a prized part of the culture. There, she also met her future husband, Elias, and gave birth to her first child, but she became concerned about the country’s “controlling and authoritarian political system” and decided to move to New York City for a safer, freer life and greater opportunity. The author and her spouse wanted to start a business, so they opened Café Buunni in 2012, just over a year after they’d landed in the city. Later, Prabasi was shocked by Donald Trump’s coarse campaign for the presidency—she became an American citizen just in time to vote in the 2016 election—and she became anxious that the country where she’d made her home was quickly becoming inhospitable to immigrants and people of color. The author’s impressionistic account of her travels is poetically thoughtful, and she has a keen eye for granular detail, which she evokes in delicate, vivid language. Also, she offers an inspiring tale of community-based political action; her cafe participated in a fundraiser for the American Civil Liberties Union, which will remind some older readers of decades past, when cafes were hotbeds of political organization. However, others may find her frenzied depiction of the United States following Trump’s election to be hyperbolic, as she describes a country that seems solely defined by its “racism, the white supremacy, the gun violence, the war economy, the individualism taken to extremes that leaves little room for empathy or compassion.”
A beautifully written memoir that offers familiar calls for political resistance but little in-depth political analysis.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73285-403-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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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