This one starts with a mini-dilemma of choice ...
"However tall the mountain, there's always a road," so goes the Afghan proverb that opens Awista Ayub's inspiring memoir. Thank goodness for the energy of youth to actually find the...
Having grown up Catholic (I'm still in recovery), nothing works better than leftover Catholic guilt to get me to do something I'm whinge-ing about. The supreme irony about my former Catholicism is...
Given the sheer number of books that arrive in the mailbox, I rarely pick up a title and start reading immediately. But something about Migritude (debuting from fabulous indie publisher Kaya Press: 'Smokin' Hot Books'!!) demanded 'read me NOW!' Once opened, I could hardly put...
In spite of the "A Work of Fiction" disclaimer on one of the front pages of Tim O'Brien's Vietnam War classic, you'll probably close the book believing every word contained between the covers to be true. That O'Brien the author names his narrator Tim O'Brien...
Unlike the rest of Andrew Lam’s relatives who only want to bombard him with questions about meeting Hiroyuki Sakai of Iron Chef fame (I don't watch TV and I hate to cook), what I want to know is, 'how's the love life?' Some might say...
For decades now, Haruki Murakami has been one of my all-time favorite novelists ever; back when my grad-schooled brain was more nimble, I even read a few of his titles in their original Japanese. While this mind has considerably weakened since then, at least the muscles are...
On this eve of 9/11, I'm in a frustrated funk. Regardless of political, religious, cultural, or ethnic affiliations, I think most Americans are shaking their heads at the state of the world, and definitely not shaking enough hands; not enough of us have been able...
Lola Rein Kaufman's "'memory button'" got turned on on September 17, 1939, when Russian tanks, trucks, and soldiers entered her small hometown of Czortków in what was then Poland. She was not yet 5 years old. Before she reached her 10th birthday, she lost her...
In the book of Exodus in the King James Version of the Bible, Moses first called himself a “stranger in a strange land.” From then on up through Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 novel of the same phrase, the “stranger in a strange land”-genre has been...
Jane Jeong Trenka's follow-up to her phenomenal debut memoir, The Language of Blood, is a searing, disturbing account of why transracial adoption does not work. Newly divorced, having severed her relationship with her adoptive parents, escaping from a violent stalker now in jail, Trenka arrives in Korea having...
The first reaction to finishing Lucky Girl is 'lucky readers.' Definitely of the 'you can't make this stuff up'-genre, journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood's debut memoir is one lucky surprise after another. Paced just right to keep you reading, the Taiwanese-born Hopgood reveals a remarkable story of her Midwest...
With the publication of her first memoir, Infidel (2007), Ayaan Hirsi Ali spent the better part of a year seeing her debut on the New York Times bestseller list. Born in Somalia, at times neglected, abandoned, or abused by her parents, the strictly-raised Muslim child that...
Tracy White’s graphic sort-of-autobiography is “only mostly true because I skipped over things, moved events around, embellished, and occasionally just plain made things up,” she explains on the first page. “The technical term for this is dramatic license. I used it,” she adds in the...
If you’re reading this review, $4 lattes or $15 lunches are probably not shock-inducing numbers. Now think about this: “Two dollars feeds a child for a week...
Mukhtar Mai's story is heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, even nauseating ...
Last night, six of my book hens (my mother likes to refer to my book club as "the chicken coop," which has an amusing ring to it in Korean: "kkoh-kkoh-jang") got together for a lively discussion of Canyon Sam's debut, Sky Train. Even though I...
If, at the end of reading (or, as in my case, listening to Fred Sanders read addictively out loud) this book, you are not completely and utterly convinced that human beings were born to run, I want to hear about it for sure. If you're...
This weekend, I get to meet Kyoko Mori in livetime [I'm scheduled to moderate an Asian American literary panel on Sunday morning as part of the first-ever Amnesty International Human Rights Art Festival, sponsored by the brand-new Asian American Literary Review). Anyone can join me,...
For anyone and everyone who has or knows a middle-grader with braces (or about to get braces), this is the book of choice to share. "I've been telling people about what happened to my teeth ever since I knocked them out in sixth grade," writes...
