You Have Given Me a Country: A Memoir
A memoiristic exploration of family history, cultural borders, and the making of a bicultural self.
Work Information
A family story becomes a map of the self.
Vaswani traces the journeys of her mother and father to understand the bicultural self they helped create. The book combines intimacy with a broad sense of cultural movement.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Sarabande Books
- Published
- 2010-08-01
- Pages
- 256 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.24 x 1.91 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781932511826
- ISBN-10
- 1932511822
- Price
- 3936 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Politics & Social Sciences/Social Sciences/Specific Demographics/Ethnic Studies
2010 ForeWord Book of the Year, Essay Silver Medalist, 2011 IPPY Awards in Multi-Cultural Adult Fiction 2011 American Book Award Vaswani is a confident writer whose unflinching eye shows the reader the beauty grounded in the mundane.” San Francisco Chronicle Vaswani’s voice is witty, sharp, innovative, unique.”Chitra Banerjee You Have Given Me a Country is an emotionally powerful exploration of blurred borders, identity, and what it means to be multicultural. Combining memoir, history, and fiction, the book follows the paths of the author's Irish-Catholic mother and Sindhi-Indian father on their journey toward each other and the biracial child they create. Neela Vaswani's second full-length work thematically echoes such books as The Color of Water , Running in the Family , or Motiba's Tatoos , but it is entirely unique in approach, voice, and story. The book reveals the self as a culmination of all that went before it, a brilliant new weave of two varied, yet ultimately universal backgrounds that spans continents, generations, languages, wars, and, at the center of it all, family. Neela Vaswani is the author of the short story collection Where the Long Grass Bends (Sarabande Books, 2004). Recipient of a 2006 O. Henry Prize, her fiction and nonfiction have been widely anthologized and published in journals such as Epoch , Shenandoah , and Prairie Schooner . She lives in New York City.
Vaswani is author of Where the Long Grass Bends (Sarabande, 2004). Recipient of a 2006 O. Henry Prize, she holds a Ph.D. in American Cultural Studies from the University of Maryland. She lives in New York and teaches at Spalding University's brief-residency MFA Program. An education activist in India and the US, Vaswani is founder of the Storylines Project.
Reviews
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Fabulous read
The words are as beautiful as the author herself. This reads like a finely crafted book of art, masterfully painting the many heritages of Neela Vaswani into a single portrait. Excellent!
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Understand Better Her Indian heritage.
What does it mean to grow up as the daughter of an Indian Father and Irish American Mother? The author explores the pull of her two heritages, but the emphasis is on the lesser known heritage of her Indian father.
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You Have Given Me A Country
Those who enjoy learning about other people's journeys through life, will find this memoir a very interesting read. The story of how a bi-racial, multi-cultural child comes of age and moves through adulthood is told with humor, pathos, and acceptance of the world as it is and the family to which one is born.
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Great
Great memoir. Read the book in a couple of days. Well written but not too artsy. I would recommend to others.
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I thought it was written very well and I learned ...
I thought it was written very well and I learned quite a bit about the family. I knew them from BNL.