Adekoya is a Nigerian Polish man, married to a Nigerian woman, and who identifies strongly with his Christian faith too. These identity factors are important to him, he tells his readers. He sets out to investigate and tell the story...
This book is definitely not intended to amuse, but I could not help but be amused as I read; being entertained while being educated is surely no bad thing. Diangelo’s Nice Racism followed on from her 2011 White Fragility, which...
North American immigrant writing tends to be dominated by the US, so it is a pleasant variation to come across a book by an Indo-Canadian author. Scaachi Koul is in her early 30s, and a writer at Buzzfeed. This, her...
In the late 90s, the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover as a low-wage worker. She wanted to examine, first-hand, the rhetoric surrounding Bill Clinton’s Welfare Reform Act, which pushed welfare recipients into minimum-wage jobs on the theory that any job...
In 1947, six nuns from Kentucky set off for Bihar, India, to build a hospital in the small town of Mokama on the banks of the Ganges. None of them spoke Hindi, or any other Indian language. None of them...
Movie-loving feminists are likely to have heard of the Bechdel Test for representation of women in film. Is there more than one woman? Do the women talk to each other? About anything other than men? It makes one take a...
I doubt I can do justice to this very original, remarkable book. But here goes anyway. Described on its cover as a novel, but somewhere between a memoir and an essay, Homeland Elegies is a scorching examination of the author’s...
Indra Nooyi’s memoir opens with a charming anecdote. In 2009 she was invited to the White House to meet India’s Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. When Obama introduced her, Manmohan Singh exclaimed, “Oh! But she is one of us!” And the...
This is such an important book to read, but it hardly needs any warning that it is not bedtime reading. Christina Lamb is a British investigative journalist who travels to many parts of the conflict-ridden world we live in, recording...
At first, the Galvins of Hidden Valley Road, Colorado, seemed to be like any other family, albeit an unusually large one — Don and Mimi Galvin had 10 boys followed by 2 girls. This was exactly what they wanted. “The...
The title of this book comes from the IRA’s mantra that all its cadres are taught that when captured and questioned, they are to stonewall, to say nothing. It also is at the heart of one of the many stories...
Nora Ephron made her name scriptwriting romantic comedy films like Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally, but it was her own life that provided the fodder for her first and only novel, Heartburn. No shortage of fodder there....
Shuggie Bain, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, deserves all its accolades. To successfully distill real life into fiction is something only highly gifted novelists can achieve, and that this was written by a debutant, is eye opening. It is...
One of those books you are glad your bookclub chose so that you read it! Trevor Noah is of course a well known public figure; this book gave a very comprehensive understanding of the South Africa he grew up in,...
Brower has collected stories from the staff who serve within the White House for this book, spanning 5 decades, 10 administrations, and from all ranks, from butlers, maids, chefs, florists, doormen – and also from former first ladies, and first...
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