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 eloquent depiction of how birding engenders a deep love of our ecosystems and a more profound understanding of ourselves.
A delightful ode to birds and a powerful defense of the planet we share with them.
In this moving memoir, filmmaker and novelist Kumar explores encounters with birds as meditations on the natural world. Told in a series of vignettes comprised of notable bird sightings, the narrative offers countless magnificent reminders of the beauty and force of nature as well as warnings of human-caused destruction as bird populations plummet due to such factors as habitat loss, water shortages, and changing temperatures. Kumar didn’t take up birding until her 20s, when a chance encounter on the beach with some avid birders and a flock of curlews transformed her life. This experience became her access point to nature, and she nurtured that connection, whether living in urban settings like Los Angeles or, later, rural New Mexico, where “even the winters are sun-drenched.” Through birds, the author was able to revisit the childhood intimacy with her surroundings that she cherished growing up in the heavily forested mountains of northeastern India. “Birds became a portal to a more vivid, enchanted world,” she writes, and “allowed me once again to relish solitude in the way I had as a child.” This sense of enchantment permeates the book as she brings us along on her adventures, including long odysseys to see bald eagles, bobcat sightings through her living room window, and glimpses of the mango-colored tanager in a city park. The author is clearly concerned about leaving a planet rich with wildlife for her children, but her ancestors are also on her mind. She lost both her parents and brother as a young adult, and she connects to their spirits through birds and nature. Ultimately, this is a book about the interconnectedness of generations and ecosystems, and birds are the conduit between the two. “Sometimes it just takes the right bird to awaken us,” writes Kumar.
An eloquent depiction of how birding engenders a deep love of our ecosystems and a more profound understanding of ourselves.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-57131-399-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
It's high spirited reading.
When Françoise Gilot, an aspiring young painter, met Pablo Picasso in May, 1943, she was twenty-one years old, he some forty years her senior.
As they grew together, setting about their mutual campaigns upon each other, she proved herself a worthy adversary rather than acolyte. In the ten years which she shared with him, undertaking to assuage his solitude, bearing him two children, meeting his friend and admirers, she maintained a cool comprehension along with her compassion for Picasso the man that shows to delightful advantage here. For Françoise Gilot has the capacity to reveal the man in his intimate and professional dealings, and Picasso is superlative, inimitable copy. Witness Picasso dangling his agents, foremost among them Kahnweller, fancing with his friends Braque and Matisse, playing cat and mouse with the women in his life -- wife Olga, Marie Therese Walter, Dora Marr, Françoise and her successor Jacqueline Roque. But the author has the capacity as well to show Picasso the artist: she quotes him on painting, describes his method of work in painting, sculpture, pottery. Picasso himself is so articulate that he defies other description; au fond, art and the artist are subversive. His re-marks on art include not only his own but that of his foremost colleagues, Matisse and Braque, Miro, Legor, Chagall...All his encounters here are formed by his own formidable temperament, and recalled in satisfying detail by the woman who shared them. An intimate, vivid, above all intelligent and authentic portrait of Picasso, with its twin elements of love and art, this should sell like mad. And rightly.
It's high spirited reading.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781681373195
Page Count: 384
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1964
BOOK REVIEW
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