The Other Americans

Author: Laila Lalami
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524747157
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
***2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST*** Winner of the Arab American Book Award in Fiction Finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Fiction Finalist for the California Book Award Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize A Los Angeles Times bestseller Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Dallas Morning News, The Guardian, Variety, and Kirkus Reviews Late one spring night in California, Driss Guerraoui—father, husband, business owner, Moroccan immigrant—is hit and killed by a speeding car. The aftermath of his death brings together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui's daughter Nora, a jazz composer returning to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; her mother, Maryam, who still pines for her life in the old country; Efraín, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, an old friend of Nora’s and an Iraqi War veteran; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son’s secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and the murdered man himself. As the characters—deeply divided by race, religion, and class—tell their stories, each in their own voice, connections among them emerge. Driss’s family confronts its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies, and love—messy and unpredictable—is born. Timely, riveting, and unforgettable, The Other Americans is at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture.

The Other America

Author: Michael Harrington
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 068482678X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
Examines the economic underworld of migrant farm workers, the aged, minority groups, and other economically underprivileged groups.

Conditional Citizens

Author: Laila Lalami
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 1524747165
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
A New York Times Editors' Choice • Best Book of the Year: Time, NPR, Bookpage, L.A. Times What does it mean to be American? In this starkly illuminating and impassioned book, Pulitzer Prize–finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using it as a starting point for her exploration of American rights, liberties, and protections. "Sharp, bracingly clear essays."—Entertainment Weekly Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth—such as national origin, race, and gender—that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today. Lalami poignantly illustrates how white supremacy survives through adaptation and legislation, with the result that a caste system is maintained that keeps the modern equivalent of white male landowners at the top of the social hierarchy. Conditional citizens, she argues, are all the people with whom America embraces with one arm and pushes away with the other. Brilliantly argued and deeply personal, Conditional Citizens weaves together Lalami’s own experiences with explorations of the place of nonwhites in the broader American culture.

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

Author: Laila Lalami
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 156512751X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
“A dream of a debut, by turns troubling and glorious, angry and wise.” —Junot Diaz Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, the debut of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Laila Lalami, evokes the grit and enduring grace that is modern Morocco. The book begins as four Moroccans illegally cross the Strait of Gibraltar in an inflatable boat headed for Spain.What has driven them to risk their lives? And will the rewards prove to be worth the danger? There’s Murad, a gentle, unemployed man who’s been reduced to hustling tourists around Tangier; Halima, who’s fleeing her drunken husband and the slums of Casablanca; Aziz, who must leave behind his devoted wife in hope of securing work in Spain; and Faten, a student and religious fanatic whose faith is at odds with an influential man determined to destroy her future. Sensitively written with beauty and boldness, this is a gripping book about what propels people to risk their lives in search of a better future.

The Moor's Account

Author: Laila Lalami
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307911675
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • The imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America—this "stunning [book] sheds light on all of the possible the New World exploration stories that didn’t make history” (Huffington Post). In these pages, Laila Lalami brings us the invented memoirs Mustafa al-Zamori, called Estebanico. The slave of a Spanish conquistador, Estebanico sails for the Americas with his master, Dorantes, as part of a danger-laden expedition to Florida. Within a year, Estebanico is one of only four crew members to survive. As he journeys across America with his Spanish companions, the Old World roles of slave and master fall away, and Estebanico remakes himself as an equal, a healer, and a remarkable storyteller. His tale illuminates the ways in which our narratives can transmigrate into history—and how storytelling can offer a chance at redemption and survival.

The Warmth of Other Suns

Author: Isabel Wilkerson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679763880
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 642

Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this beautifully written masterwork, the Pulitzer Prize–winnner and bestselling author of Caste chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

The Forgotten Americans

Author: Isabel Sawhill
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300230362
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
A sobering account of a disenfranchised American working class and important policy solutions to the nation's economic inequalities One of the country's leading scholars on economics and social policy, Isabel Sawhill addresses the enormous divisions in American society--economic, cultural, and political--and what might be done to bridge them. Widening inequality and the loss of jobs to trade and technology has left a significant portion of the American workforce disenfranchised and skeptical of governments and corporations alike. And yet both have a role to play in improving the country for all. Sawhill argues for a policy agenda based on mainstream values, such as family, education, and work. Although many have lost faith in government programs designed to help them, there are still trusted institutions on both the local and the federal level that can deliver better job opportunities and higher wages to those who have been left behind. At the same time, the private sector needs to reexamine how it trains and rewards employees. This book provides a clear-headed and middle-way path to a better-functioning society in which personal responsibility is honored and inclusive capitalism and more broadly shared growth are once more the norm.

Secret Son

Author: Laila Lalami
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616200014
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Book Description
Raised by his mother in a one-room house in the slums of Casablanca, Youssef El Mekki has always had big dreams of living another life in another world. Suddenly his dreams are within reach when he discovers that his father—whom he’d been led to believe was dead—is very much alive. A wealthy businessman, he seems eager to give his son a new start. Youssef leaves his mother behind to live a life of luxury, until a reversal of fortune sends him back to the streets and his childhood friends. Trapped once again by his class and painfully aware of the limitations of his prospects, he becomes easy prey for a fringe Islamic group. In the spirit of The Inheritance of Loss and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Laila Lalami’s debut novel looks at the struggle for identity, the need for love and family, and the desperation that grips ordinary lives in a world divided by class, politics, and religion.

The Book of Unknown Americans

Author: Cristina Henríquez
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 1782111212
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Book Description
When Alma Rivera arrives in Delaware she is full of the promise and possibilities of her new home. Hope that her daughter Maribel will be helped by the specialist support US education can provide, and faith that her husband Arturo will flourish in a country that celebrates the hard-working. But life without status, money, family and friends soon becomes unmanageable and violent. Told through a range of perspectives written with compassion and grace, Cristina Henríquez gives voice to the displaced and the unknown, and shows what it means to uproot your life in search of something better.

The Other American Moderns

Author: ShiPu Wang
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271080701
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 422

Book Description
In The Other American Moderns, ShiPu Wang analyzes the works of four early twentieth-century American artists who engaged with the concept of “Americanness”: Frank Matsura, Eitarō Ishigaki, Hideo Noda, and Miki Hayakawa. In so doing, he recasts notions of minority artists’ contributions to modernism and American culture. Wang presents comparative studies of these four artists’ figurative works that feature Native Americans, African Americans, and other racial and ethnic minorities, including Matsura and Susan Timento Pose at Studio (ca. 1912), The Bonus March (1932), Scottsboro Boys (1933), and Portrait of a Negro (ca. 1926). Rather than creating art that reflected “Asian aesthetics,” Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, and Hayakawa deployed “imagery of the Other by the Other” as their means of exploring, understanding, and contesting conditions of diaspora and notions of what it meant to be American in an age of anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation. Based on a decade-long excavation of previously unexamined collections in the United States and Japan, The Other American Moderns is more than a rediscovery of “forgotten” minority artists: it reconceives American modernism by illuminating these artists’ active role in the shaping of a multicultural and cosmopolitan culture. This nuanced analysis of their deliberate engagement with the ideological complexities of American identity contributes a new vision to our understanding of non-European identity in modernism and American art.