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
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Lorde’s big heart and fierce mind are at full strength on each page of this deeply personal and deeply political collection.
The groundbreaking Black lesbian writer and activist chronicles her experience with cancer.
In her mid-40s, Lorde (1934-1992) was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a radical mastectomy. Through prose, poems, and selected journal entries beginning six months after the surgery, the author explores the anger, pain, and fear that her illness wrought. Her recovery was characterized by resistance and learning to love her body again. She envisioned herself as a powerful fighter while also examining the connection between her illness and her activism. “There is no room around me in which to be still,” she writes, “to examine and explore what pain is mine alone—no device to separate my struggle within from my fury at the outside world’s viciousness, the stupid brutal lack of consciousness or concern that passes for the way things are. The arrogant blindness of comfortable white women. What is this work all for? What does it matter if I ever speak again or not?” Lorde confronts other tough questions, including the role of holistic and alternative treatments and whether her cancer (and its recurrence) was preventable. She writes of eschewing “superficial spirituality” and repeatedly rejecting the use of prosthesis because it felt like “a lie” at precisely the time she was “seeking new ways of strength and trying to find the courage to tell the truth.” Forty years after its initial publication and with a new foreword by Tracy K. Smith, the collection remains a raw reckoning with illness and death as well as a challenge to the conventional expectations of women with cancer. More universally, Lorde’s rage and the clarity that follows offer us a blueprint for facing our mortality and living boldly in the time we have. This empowering compilation is heartbreaking, beautiful, and timeless.
Lorde’s big heart and fierce mind are at full strength on each page of this deeply personal and deeply political collection.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-313520-3
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
