A sympathetic portrait of South Asians who are neither crazy and rich nor humorless nerds.
A New York Times reporter and stand-up comedian travels to India, looking for clues to his immigrant parents’ lives, and finds lighter moments amid dark family secrets.
Growing up Hindu in suburban New Jersey, debut author Deb learned that Indian weddings were multiday events, “a slightly tamer version of Burning Man.” When his best friend decided to get married in India, the author decided to make his first visit to the country to which his father had returned after his parents’ divorce. Deb hoped to find answers to long-simmering questions: Why was his mother so unhappy? What made his parents’ arranged marriage a disaster when an aunt and uncle’s had thrived? Why had his father abruptly gone back to India, without explaining why? Accompanied by his American girlfriend, Deb embarked on a five-city tour that began at his father’s flat in a neighborhood he calls “the Brooklyn of Kolkata.” Over the next three weeks, as he visited relatives and monuments, skeletons tumbled out of a family closet that the author breezily inventories. He chronicles his years as a “self-loathing Bengali child” in largely white suburbs, his discovery that stand-up comedy could be “cathartic,” and his former work as a CBS News reporter covering the Trump campaign. In the foreword, Hasan Minhaj rightly says that Deb “goes well beyond the typical, ‘Hey, my parents wanted me to get straight A’s’ model minority narrative.” As the author discusses his travel from Kolkata to Agra and beyond, the book often resembles a rougher-around-the-edges version of a Bill Bryson travelogue, featuring a wisecracking tone that sometimes turns sophomoric. (Deb’s first reaction to the Taj Mahal: “Holy shit. It’s right there. Holy shit. It’s right there. IT’S RIGHT THERE.”) Memoirs by children of immigrants often fault clueless parents; this one is refreshing for Deb’s realization that—whatever his elders’ missteps—he needed “to take some responsibility for my part in our family’s disconnect” for things to change.
A sympathetic portrait of South Asians who are neither crazy and rich nor humorless nerds.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293676-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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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