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
Demonstrates how very thin is the gilt on the Golden State.
With humor, history, nostalgia, and acerbity, Didion (Political Fictions, 2001, etc.) considers the conundrums of California, her beloved home state.
Pieces of this remarkable memoir have appeared in the writer’s usual venues (e.g., the New York Review of Books), but she has crafted the connections among them so artfully that the work acquires a surprising cumulative power. Didion tells a number of stories that would not in lesser hands appear to be related: the arrival in California of her pioneer ancestors, the nasty 1993 episode involving randy adolescents who called themselves the “Spur Posse,” the fall of the aerospace industry in the 1990s, her 1948 eighth-grade graduation speech (“Our California Heritage”), the history of the state, and the death of her parents. Along the way she deals with some California novels from earlier days, Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon and Frank Norris’s The Octopus, and explores the community histories of Hollister, Irvine, and Lakewood (home of the Posse). She sees fundamental contradictions in the California dream. For one, older generations resented the arrival of the “newcomers,” who in their minds were spoiling the view. But as Didion points out, the old-timers had once done the same. More profound is her recognition that Californians, many of whom embrace the ideal of rugged individualism and reject “government interference,” nonetheless have accepted from the feds sums of money vast enough to mesmerize Midas. Water-management programs have been especially costly, but tax breaks for all sorts of other industries and enterprises have greatly enriched some in the state (railroad magnates, housing developers, defense contractors) while most everyone else battles for scraps beneath the table. Most affecting are her horrifying portrait of Lakewood as a community devoted to high-school sports at the expense of scholarship and her wrenching accounts of the deaths of her father and mother.
Demonstrates how very thin is the gilt on the Golden State.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2003
ISBN: 0-679-43332-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all...
Science writer Ackerman (Ah-Choo!: The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold, 2010, etc.) looks at the new science surrounding avian intelligence.
The takeaway: calling someone a birdbrain is a compliment. And in any event, as Ackerman observes early on, “intelligence is a slippery concept, even in our own species, tricky to define and tricky to measure.” Is a bird that uses a rock to break open a clamshell the mental equivalent of a tool-using primate? Perhaps that’s the wrong question, for birds are so unlike humans that “it’s difficult for us to fully appreciate their mental capabilities,” given that they’re really just small, feathered dinosaurs who inhabit a wholly different world from our once-arboreal and now terrestrial one. Crows and other corvids have gotten all the good publicity related to bird intelligence in recent years, but Ackerman, who does allow that some birds are brighter than others, points favorably to the much-despised pigeon as an animal that “can remember hundreds of different objects for long periods of time, discriminate between different painting styles, and figure out where it’s going, even when displaced from familiar territory by hundreds of miles.” Not bad for a critter best known for bespattering statues in public parks. Ackerman travels far afield to places such as Barbados and New Caledonia to study such matters as memory, communication, and decision-making, the last largely based on visual cues—though, as she notes, birds also draw ably on other senses, including smell, which in turn opens up insight onto “a weird evolutionary paradox that scientists have puzzled over for more than a decade”—a matter of the geometry of, yes, the bird brain.
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all their diversity will want to read this one.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-521-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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