A powerful memoir of deep loss driven by the author’s desire to get at harrowing answers to difficult questions.
The poignant memoir of two brothers raised under the dark shadow of Indian Partition who forged wildly different paths in life.
Dutta (Bloodlines: The Imperial Roots of Terrorism in South Asia, 2015, etc.) and his older brother, Kaushal (“Raju”), were born in the late 1960s to poor Hindu refugees in Jaipur. Their Indian father, a government clerk, had arrived in 1959, forced by the violence after the Partition to flee his homeland. From enjoying the status of Brahmin to living in a near-destitute condition, the family spiraled over the decades into “bitter shame” and familial squabbles, a toxic atmosphere in which Dutta and Raju were raised. While Raju was by nature precocious, charming, and daring, the author, in contrast, grew inward, becoming idealistic and shy. In moving, honest prose, Dutta follows the disparate trajectories of their lives. Raju became entangled in a relationship with a rich, older gay man, which propelled him into posh jet-setting and eventually a criminal life abroad. Meanwhile, the author fell in love with an American woman and followed her to America in 1986. Dutta went to school, became a research biologist and then, in an odd but determined turn, a police officer in Los Angeles and a professor of homeland security and issues-involved terrorism. Meanwhile, Raju descended into the life of a con man and, later, terrorist. Both were cancer survivors. The memoir opens with a shattering call from France, where Raju had married and was living, to notify the author that his brother had been incarcerated for murder. Throughout, Dutta captures the enormous sense of humiliation wrought by this crisis; in Indian society, he writes, “the responsibility for a crime lies not with the perpetrator, but with the entire family.”
A powerful memoir of deep loss driven by the author’s desire to get at harrowing answers to difficult questions.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-279585-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Anthony Bourdain/Ecco
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
A heartfelt and haunting memoir just right for the current political and social climate.
An acclaimed Mexican-born poet’s account of the sometimes-overwhelming struggles he and his parents faced in their quest to become American citizens.
Hernandez Castillo (Cenzontle, 2018, etc.) first came to the United States with his undocumented Mexican parents in 1993. But life in the shadows came at a high price. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided their home on multiple occasions and eventually deported the author’s father back to Mexico. In this emotionally raw memoir, Hernandez Castillo explores his family’s traumas through a fractured narrative that mirrors their own fragmentation. Of his own personal experiences, he writes, “when I came undocumented to the U.S., I crossed into a threshold of invisibility.” To protect himself against possible identification as an undocumented person, he excelled in school and learned English “better than any white person, any citizen.” When he was old enough to work, he created a fake social security card to apply for the jobs that helped him support his fatherless family. After high school, he attended college and married a Mexican American woman. He became an MFA student at the University of Michigan and qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allowed him to visit his father in Mexico, where he discovered the depth of his cultural disorientation. Battling through ever present anxiety, the author revisited his and his parents’ origins and then returned to take on the difficult interview that qualified him for a green card. His footing in the U.S. finally solidified, Hernandez Castillo unsuccessfully attempted to help his father and mother qualify for residency in the U.S. Only after his father was kidnapped by members of a drug cartel was the author able to help his mother, whose life was now in danger, seek asylum in the U.S. Honest and unsparing, this book offers a detailed look at the dehumanizing immigration system that shattered the author’s family while offering a glimpse into his own deeply conflicted sense of what it means to live the so-called American dream.
A heartfelt and haunting memoir just right for the current political and social climate.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-282559-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Lionel Dahmer, father of mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, here writes one of the most courageous, unsensational books ever written about serial murder. It does not even summarize Jeffrey's crimes. Dahmer takes upon himself much of the guilt for his son's acts by considering a genetic predisposition to murder he may have passed on to his son; various acts of his own moral blindness that may have contributed to his son's deprived emotional being; and things he did and didn't do when certain symptoms appeared that might have alerted him to Jeffrey's lust for sexual atrocity. What parts of the father, the book asks, are replicated in the son? Largely, Jeffrey is a failure whose failings were earlier those of his father, though the father overcame each failing as its pain grew. Intellectually and physically inferior as a child, Lionel was tutored by his parents from first grade on, and by dint of hard study earned a doctorate in chemistry. A puny child, he took up body-building as a teenager and turned himself into a fine physical specimen. But he also had murderous dreams from which he would awake trembling. Jeffrey's mother was also a depressive, and her excessive pill-taking during pregnancy may well have damaged Jeffrey's genes. As a child, he developed a testicular hernia that, when treated by surgery, gave him a fear of castration and seemed to lead into lasting withdrawal from his family and friendships and, by the time he was 15, into alcoholism and a liking for dead things. Lionel sees Jeffrey's main psychotic trigger lying in a need to control: his own need for intellectual and physical control resulted in a glass wall between himself and Jeffrey; Jeffrey's need for control grew into a need for drugged or dead lovers who submitted to him absolutely. Clear, modest, intelligent—and extremely disturbing.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-12156-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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