A unique portrait of post–9/11 Sikhs hampered by its rebranding of old ideas as “revolutionary.”
A Los Angeles–based Sikh American activist, lawyer, and filmmaker tries to reinvent the wheel of love in her coming-of-age memoir.
As the child of Sikh farmers in Clovis, California, Kaur grew up with the Punjabi phrase “chardi kala,” often translated as “relentless optimism,” a state prized by her faith. She has perhaps taken those words too much to heart in her first book, an overambitious blend of memoir, self-help, and left-leaning polemic. As a Stanford undergraduate, Kaur learned that a Sikh family friend had become “the first person killed in a hate crime after 9/11,” and the tragedy led her to travel across the country to interview other victims, whose stories she told in the documentary Divided We Fall. At Yale Law School, Kaur served as a legal observer at a prisoner’s hearing at Guantánamo, where the U.S. naval base just over the hill from the detention center was “a fantastical cross between small-town America and a Caribbean seaside resort,” with fast food restaurants, tennis courts, and a bowling alley. Unwisely, the author folds vivid sections on those and other trips into a meandering, New Age–y brief on the “revolutionary” effort “to reclaim love as a force for justice in our time” and “to love even our opponents.” Toward that end, Kaur suggests “meditating, expressing gratitude, retreating, bodywork, and being in nature” as well as other overfamiliar warhorses of the self-help genre. Throughout the book, her call for acts like “forgiveness” clashes with her view that rage is “a rightful response to the social traumas of patriarchy, white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and poverty.” Depending on the situation, that view is debatable, and while the author offers plenty of good material on the plight of Sikh Americans after 9/11, those elements account for less than half the book; the rest is the author's heavily ideological "manifesto."
A unique portrait of post–9/11 Sikhs hampered by its rebranding of old ideas as “revolutionary.”Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-50909-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.
An analysis of our emotions and the skills required to understand them.
We all have emotions, but how many of us have the vocabulary to accurately describe our experiences or to understand how our emotions affect the way we act? In this guide to help readers with their emotions, Brackett, the founding director of Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, presents a five-step method he calls R.U.L.E.R.: We need to recognize our emotions, understand what has caused them, be able to label them with precise terms and descriptions, know how to safely and effectively express them, and be able to regulate them in productive ways. The author walks readers through each step and provides an intriguing tool to use to help identify a specific emotion. Brackett introduces a four-square grid called a Mood Meter, which allows one to define where an emotion falls based on pleasantness and energy. He also uses four colors for each quadrant: yellow for high pleasantness and high energy, red for low pleasantness and high energy, green for high pleasantness and low energy, and blue for low pleasantness and low energy. The idea is to identify where an emotion lies in this grid in order to put the R.U.L.E.R. method to good use. The author’s research is wide-ranging, and his interweaving of his personal story with the data helps make the book less academic and more accessible to general readers. It’s particularly useful for parents and teachers who want to help children learn to handle difficult emotions so that they can thrive rather than be overwhelmed by them. The author’s system will also find use in the workplace. “Emotions are the most powerful force inside the workplace—as they are in every human endeavor,” writes Brackett. “They influence everything from leadership effectiveness to building and maintaining complex relationships, from innovation to customer relations.”
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-21284-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
This is a man who has seen it all, and he sure does know how to tell a story.
Fighting back against a nearly fatal health crisis, a renowned foreign correspondent reviews his career.
New York Times journalist Nordland, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has reported from more than 150 countries. Working in Delhi on July 4, 2019, he had a seizure and lost consciousness. At that point, he began his “second life,” one defined by a glioblastoma multiforme tumor. “From 3 to 6 percent of glioblastoma patients are cured; one of them will bear my name,” writes the author, while claiming that the disease “has proved to be the best thing that ever happened to me.” From the perspective of his second life, which marked the end of his estrangement from his adult children, he reflects on his first, which began with a difficult childhood in Philadelphia. His abusive father was a “predatory pedophile.” His mother, fortunately, was “astonishingly patient and saintly,” and Nordland and his younger siblings stuck close together. After a brief phase of youthful criminality, the author began his career in journalism at the Penn State campus newspaper. Interspersing numerous landmark articles—some less interesting than others, but the best are wonderful—Nordland shows how he carried out the burden of being his father’s son: “Whether in Bosnia or Kabul, Cambodia or Nigeria, Philadelphia or Baghdad, I always seemed to gravitate toward stories about vulnerable people, especially women and children—since they will always be the most vulnerable in any society—being exploited or mistreated by powerful men or powerful social norms.” Indeed, some of the stories reveal the worst in human nature. A final section, detailing his life since his diagnosis in chapters such as “I Forget the Name of This Chapter: On Memory,” wraps up the narrative with humor, candor, and reflection.
This is a man who has seen it all, and he sure does know how to tell a story.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780063096226
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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