A fresh and timely perspective on the immigrant experience—required reading for fans of Stefanovic and a strong inducement...
A writer and raconteur chronicles her life growing up in the former-Yugoslavian immigrant subculture of 1990s Australia.
Stefanovic (You're Just Too Good to Be True, 2015), the host of the literary salon Women of Letters New York, uses the eponymous pageant to introduce the “ex-Yugos,” immigrants from the former Yugoslavia who found refuge in Australia from the brutal wars of the Slobodan Miloševi? regime. The author’s adolescence coincided with the dissolution of her country. Her parents, anti-Miloševi? activists and members of an urban intellectual elite, sensed the coming storm and moved their family abroad to secure citizenship and hence an escape route from the impending conflicts. Stefanovic recounts her youth, from earliest memories of life in Serbia to a few formative years spent bouncing between Melbourne and Belgrade and finally back to Australia for good, where she joined the growing Serbian-Australian population forced to watch TV news snippets of their home country imploding. The author effectively explains how, despite her proud ambivalence, she came to embrace “ex-Yugo” culture so thoroughly that she agreed to compete in a gaudy local beauty pageant to represent it. Living between two cultures added fuel to the already blazing fires of adolescent awkwardness, and Stefanovic tends to deprecate rather than sympathize with her past self, whom she casts as pathetic and attention-seeking. Yet being an outsider sharpened her powers of observation and improved her gifts for language, setting her on the path toward a career as a storytelling performer. Eventually, Stefanovic found her way to activism through writing. Her quirky, poignant, relatable anecdotes offer a nuanced and unflinching portrait of lived experience, rejecting the media’s oversimplified accounts of the Yugoslavian wars and helping to break down the monolithic labels applied to refugees from those wars, especially Serbians. Her stories show the ways in which war warps the lives of generations, even those who never witness violence firsthand.
A fresh and timely perspective on the immigrant experience—required reading for fans of Stefanovic and a strong inducement for newcomers to explore the rest of her work.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6574-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
No one’s mind will be changed by Karl’s book, but it’s a valuable report from the scene of an ongoing train wreck.
The chief White House and Washington correspondent for ABC provides a ringside seat to a disaster-ridden Oval Office.
It is Karl to whom we owe the current popularity of a learned Latin term. Questioning chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, he followed up a perhaps inadvertently honest response on the matter of Ukrainian intervention in the electoral campaign by saying, “What you just described is a quid pro quo.” Mulvaney’s reply: “Get over it.” Karl, who has been covering Trump for decades and knows which buttons to push and which to avoid, is not inclined to get over it: He rightly points out that a reporter today “faces a president who seems to have no appreciation or understanding of the First Amendment and the role of a free press in American democracy.” Yet even against a bellicose, untruthful leader, he adds, the press “is not the opposition party.” The author, who keeps his eye on the subject and not in the mirror, writes of Trump’s ability to stage situations, as when he once called Trump out, at an event, for misrepresenting poll results and Trump waited until the camera was off before exploding, “Fucking nasty guy!”—then finished up the interview as if nothing had happened. Trump and his inner circle are also, by Karl’s account, masters of timing, matching negative news such as the revelation that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election with distractions away from Trump—in this case, by pushing hard on the WikiLeaks emails from the Democratic campaign, news of which arrived at the same time. That isn’t to say that they manage people or the nation well; one of the more damning stories in a book full of them concerns former Homeland Security head Kirstjen Nielsen, cut off at the knees even while trying to do Trump’s bidding.
No one’s mind will be changed by Karl’s book, but it’s a valuable report from the scene of an ongoing train wreck.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4562-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
IN THE NEWS
Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.
Award-winning scientist Jahren (Geology and Geophysics/Univ. of Hawaii) delivers a personal memoir and a paean to the natural world.
The author’s father was a physics and earth science teacher who encouraged her play in the laboratory, and her mother was a student of English literature who nurtured her love of reading. Both of these early influences engrossingly combine in this adroit story of a dedication to science. Jahren’s journey from struggling student to struggling scientist has the narrative tension of a novel and characters she imbues with real depth. The heroes in this tale are the plants that the author studies, and throughout, she employs her facility with words to engage her readers. We learn much along the way—e.g., how the willow tree clones itself, the courage of a seed’s first root, the symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi, and the airborne signals used by trees in their ongoing war against insects. Trees are of key interest to Jahren, and at times she waxes poetic: “Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.” The author draws many parallels between her subjects and herself. This is her story, after all, and we are engaged beyond expectation as she relates her struggle in building and running laboratory after laboratory at the universities that have employed her. Present throughout is her lab partner, a disaffected genius named Bill, whom she recruited when she was a graduate student at Berkeley and with whom she’s worked ever since. The author’s tenacity, hope, and gratitude are all evident as she and Bill chase the sweetness of discovery in the face of the harsh economic realities of the research scientist.
Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87493-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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