PPCA Book Selection Survey for 2025
Survey open now
PPCA’s Book Club selects most books through annual surveys, with the only exception being author appearances. We are now selecting the books we’ll discuss in April 2025 to January 2026. Please study the 20 options and then vote for up to 10 via the link at the bottom of the page. This survey will close Friday, November 8, 2024 at 21:00 PST.
Survey #1
Adjapon, Bisi: Daughter in Exile (2023)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: Adjapon (The Teller of Secrets) chronicles a Ghanaian woman’s wrenching story of migration, disillusionment, and resilience. Lola has an embassy job in Dakar, Senegal, in the late 1990s, and her relationship with American Marine Armand takes on higher stakes when Lola, unexpectedly pregnant, travels to America to give birth so their child will have U.S. citizenship. Soon, though, Armand disavows Lola, leaving her stranded. But the smart and resourceful Lola takes advantage of her diplomatic connections and her education to persist through an exhausting series of setbacks over the next several years, culminating in a 2007 immigration case that will decide her fate. Adjapon’s fast-moving, character-driven narrative illuminates the challenges faced by immigrants; Lola is constantly at risk of exploitation by potential employers, her housing situation is perpetually tenuous, and she struggles to find acceptance. As an immigrant, she feels alienated from African American communities, though she eventually finds something of a community with the members of a Christian church. Her trust, however, only goes so far, and Adjapon pulls off a strikingly frank portrait of a woman worn down by the system (waiting on news of whether she’ll be deported to Ghana, Lola reflects, “I welcome either choice. I’m weary of peripheral living”). Adjapon continues to dazzle.
Survey #2
Alharthi, Jokha, and Marilyn Booth: Bitter Orange Tree (2022)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: Man Booker International Prize winner Alharthi (Celestial Bodies) returns with a gorgeous and insightful story of longing. Zuhour, now at university in the U.K., spent her girlhood in a small Omani village, brought up mainly by a grandmotherly woman named Bint Aamir, whom Zuhour’s grandfather Salman had charitably taken in years earlier. Bint Aamir raised Salman’s son and, eventually, Zuhour, as Salman’s wife was too mired in depression and obsessed with piety to take responsibility. Bint Aamir gradually lets go of her dreams for a plot of land to tend and a husband and children of her own, takes comfort drinking coffee in the shade of her beloved bitter orange tree, and dies just before Zuhour leaves for college. Away, Zuhour is troubled by unsettling dreams of Bint Aamir and tries to cope through therapy and friends such as the wealthy, sophisticated Pakistani sisters Suroor and Kuhl. The latter is married without the knowledge of her parents to Imran, a handsome fellow medical student of lowly, rural origins, and Zuhour, Kuhl, and Imran form an exclusive triangle. Zuhour loves both, mainly the charming, taciturn Imran, whose humility, self-sacrifice, and agricultural roots inevitably remind her of Bint Aamir and the sense of belonging she misses so much. The bittersweet narrative, intuitively translated by Booth, is chock-full of indelible images symbolizing freedom struck down, such as a battered kite and a bird ripped to shreds. This solidifies Alharthi’s well-earned literary reputation.
Survey #3
Enrigue, Álvaro, and Natasha Zimmer: You Dreamed of Empires (2022/2024)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: Enrigue (Sudden Death) once again reimagines history in this dynamic and stimulating chronicle of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés’s expedition into the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in 1519. Despite Cortés’s blunder of trying to hug Emperor Moctezuma upon their initial greeting, Moctezuma welcomes the Spanish expedition into his palace, where the party waits for their official meeting with him. The perspective jumps between a host of characters on both sides, including Moctezuma’s sister and wife, the princess Atotoxtli, who tries to counsel the emperor despite his melancholy and reliance on hallucinogenic drugs; and Jazmín Caldera, Cortés’s third in command who gets lost in the mazelike palace on a quest to find the expedition’s horses. As everyone waits for the fateful meeting, Cortés’s translator wonders whether the Spaniards are “visitors or prisoners.” Enrigue sustains a seductive yet ominous tone that evokes a persistent threat of violence, and he caps things off with a dizzying climactic scene that offers an alternative to the historical record and dovetails with the book’s heavy dose of hallucinogens. Flexing his narrative muscle, Enrigue brings the past to vivid, brain-melting life.
Survey #4
Fairbanks, Eve: The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning (2022)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: Apartheid’s legacy of inequality and alienation is outlined in this searching debut from American-born journalist Fairbanks, who moved to South Africa in 2009. Documenting the fallout from the end of sanctioned white supremacy in 1994, Fairbanks focuses on Dipuo (no last names given), a former African National Congress militant who organized against the apartheid government in Soweto in the early 1990s and participated in violence against Blacks suspected of collaboration, and her daughter Malaika, a Black Consciousness activist who protests the ongoing marginalization of Black South Africans. Fairbanks also spotlights Christo, a white lawyer and ex-soldier who fought the ANC in the early 1990s–killing a Black civilian–and is now active in an Afrikaner cultural revival that casts whites as the besieged minority. Fairbanks’s vivid reportage depicts a South Africa awash in racial unease and false consciousness: whites are beset by a sense of dispossession and imperilment–largely unjustified, she argues–tinged with guilt; Blacks, frustrated by intractable poverty and the ANC government’s inability to deliver economic development, denounce systemic racism while wondering if their failures vindicate racist assumptions. Distinguished by its sympathetic yet clear-eyed viewpoint, this vital study lays bare the complex, agonizing predicaments that flow from South Africa’s tragic past.
Survey #5
Ferguson, Jane: No Ordinary Assignment: A Memoir (2023)
Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: An award-winning war reporter recounts her remarkable career in some of the most dangerous places on the planet. Ferguson begins in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Her childhood was marked by cold, anxious tension within her family and her country. However, this “stint on high alert” primed her for a career built through grit, moxie, and substantial risk: reporting from the epicenters of some of the most catastrophic conflicts of our time—in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Ukraine, and more. With vivid details and pointed reflection, her memoir draws readers into the world of war that exists beyond the “bang bang” of most news coverage. Chronicling her journey on bumpy mountain roads and through tense military checkpoints, embedding with soldiers and visiting makeshift field hospitals, Ferguson clearly demonstrates the devastating, oft-overlooked impact of war on civilians from every side. “There are always so many more,” she writes, “who suffer and die due to the unintended consequences of conflict: the collapse of economies and governments, and with these failures, the chances for any decent public health—sanitation, nutrition, or medical care.” She is an expert storyteller, conveying the fear and anxiety of her many harrowing close calls and the heartbreak of so many of her personal interviews. Her story of building a career in war reporting has an equally powerful arc, as she shows how she went from feeling like an impostor, plagued by doubt and shame, to a quietly confident professional. The author also goes beyond any adrenaline-junkie stereotype with frank rumination that grants space to grapple with heart-wrenching emotional confrontations as well as the moral complexities of her own role. While acknowledging the particularities of being a woman in her position, including the prevalence of double standards, she does not allow herself to be reduced to them. A captivating, honest, and powerful attempt to do justice to the hardest stories to tell.
Survey #6
Injam, Nishanth: The Best Possible Experience: Stories (2023)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: The protagonists in Injam’s dynamic and insightful debut collection explore cultural identity and family relationships in India and the U.S. In “The Bus,” the narrator, a customer support worker for Bank of America, takes an hours-long bus ride from Bengaluru to his hometown to visit his parents. The trip turns eerie as one passenger after another gets up to use the restroom and then disappears, and the remaining passengers feel the need to escape as the air in the bus grows increasingly cold. It seems their journey ends in their deaths, though a playful tone offsets the morbid theme (“I knew about planes, but I didn’t know these things happen on buses too,” the narrator’s seatmate tells him). In “The Immigrant,” Aditya plans to relocate to Philadelphia from India to help earn money for his mother’s lung transplant. On arrival in the U.S., he’s met at the airport by Indian students who advise him on how to act around white people. The inventive form of “The Math of Living” conveys how a coder at the Chicago Tribune reflects in mathematical terms on his impending visit back to India, where he expects everything to be “formulaic” after reuniting with his family (“My father will do or . My mother will do or “). Injam succeeds in equal measure with the variety of styles, and he offers enriching details about the various experiences his characters face as immigrants and offshore workers. This is a triumph.
Survey #7
Kuku, Damilare: Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad: Stories (2022)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: With this singular debut collection, Nigerian author Kuku digs into the trials and tribulations of dating and married life for women in Lagos. The frank “Cuck-up,” narrated in the second person, begins, “One night, you will calmly put a knife to your husband’s penis and promise to cut it off.” The narrator then attempts to convince her husband’s family to intervene and push him to work rather than mooch off her. When that doesn’t succeed, the couple’s financial woes build to an unsettling denouement—less Lorena Bobbitt than Indecent Proposal. In “The Annointed Wife,” the wife of a pastor accused of hiring a sex worker stands behind her husband, indignant at what she believes are unfounded rumors. Her feelings change after she learns more about his secret life. The dual narrative of “Catfish” follows an up-and-coming musician named Don Okoro who slides into the DMs of a woman named Dooshima. Sensing he’d prefer casual sex to a serious relationship, she ends up turning down his booty call, though he still manages to hurt her feelings. Kuku finds both hideousness and humor in her precise details and candid, voice-driven characterizations. Readers who have had their own share of bad romances will appreciate the realness on display.
Survey #8
Matar, Hisham: The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between* (2016)
* 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography
Review: ©Booklist: Matar envies mourners at funerals. Unlike him, they have the luxury of knowing that their loved ones are dead. The uncertainty about what became of his father after he was incarcerated in a prison in Tripoli has haunted Matar’s years of living away from his homeland of Libya. After several decades, novelist Matar returns to the country in this elegiac memoir. His father was a high-ranking military officer when Muammar al-Qaddafi came to power, and was imprisoned before being exiled. Those Matar’s father associated with in his efforts against the Qaddafi regime—many of them relatives—met similar fates. Matar recounts their stories, the precious few details he was able to collect about his father, and his own anguish in the twilight of uncertainty following his father’s presumed death. It is a testament to the power of his story that his own search campaign, involving human-rights organizations and both the Libyan and British governments, takes second place to the bitter poignance of his journey home. With muscular elegance, Matar demonstrates that hope can be a form of agony.
Survey #9
Mwanza Mujila, Fiston, and Roland Glasser: The Villain’s Dance (2020/2024)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: The precarity of late-1990s Zaire (present-day Democratic Republic of Congo) and the scramble amid the country’s collapse in the wake of the Rwandan genocide shape the freewheeling and inventive latest from Mujila (Tram 83). In Lubumbashi, adolescent Sanza falls into a glue-huffing street gang and is later recruited by intelligence agent Monsieur Guillame to spy on various citizens at the city’s popular rumba bars. A parallel narrative set across the border in Angola follows Tshiamuena, a woman claiming to be centuries old and simultaneously living in Japan, who offers spiritual guidance to Zairians lured by Angola’s diamond mines. She conscripts a young Austrian man named Franz Baumgartner to write her memoirs, but he’s unable to make sense of her shifting stories and eventually flees to Lubumbashi, where he spends nights at the rumba bars, catching the attention of Guillame. As rebels successfully topple president Mobuto Sese Seko’s regime and move toward Lubumbashi, the characters take desperate measures to survive. Mujila’s virtuosic narrative shifts, feverish magical realism, and dizzying chronological leaps make for an intoxicating reading experience. This complex tale bears exquisite fruit.
Survey #10
Navalny, Alexei: Patriot: A Memoir (2024)
Synopsis: The powerful and moving memoir of a fearless political opposition leader who paid the ultimate price for his beliefs. Alexei Navalny began writing Patriot shortly after his near-fatal poisoning in 2020. It is the full story of his life: his youth, his call to activism, his marriage and family, his commitment to challenging a world super-power determined to silence him, and his total conviction that change cannot be resisted—and will come. In vivid, page-turning detail, including never-before-seen correspondence from prison, Navalny recounts, among other things, his political career, the many attempts on his life, and the lives of the people closest to him, and the relentless campaign he and his team waged against an increasingly dictatorial regime. Written with the passion, wit, candor, and bravery for which he was justly acclaimed, Patriot is Navalny’s final letter to the world: a moving account of his last years spent in the most brutal prison on earth; a reminder of why the principles of individual freedom matter so deeply; and a rousing call to continue the work for which he sacrificed his life. “This book is a testament not only to Alexei’s life, but to his unwavering commitment to the fight against dictatorship—a fight he gave everything for, including his life. Through its pages, readers will come to know the man I loved deeply—a man of profound integrity and unyielding courage. Sharing his story will not only honor his memory but also inspire others to stand up for what is right and to never lose sight of the values that truly matter.” —Yulia Navalnaya
Survey #11
Oza, Janika: A History of Burning (2023)
Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: Four generations of an Indian family struggle with displacement in this debut novel. Artfully juggling the perspectives of 10 characters over the span of nearly a century, Oza follows the members of an ordinary family from India to Africa to Canada as they struggle to maintain their cultural traditions and solidarity amid an often hostile environment and changing social norms. Pirbhai, the patriarch, is lured to Africa as a 13-year-old in 1898, where he’s pressed into indentured servitude laying track for the British railway to Lake Victoria. His fateful decision to obey an order to set fire to a village the British wanted gone provides the novel’s title and looms over his descendants as a sort of original sin. After he moves from Kenya to Uganda, his family slowly climbs the economic ladder into the middle class until the moment in 1972 when the dictator Idi Amin orders the expulsion of all Asians. When Arun, an anti-government activist, disappears following his arrest, his wife, Latika, Pirbhai’s granddaughter, allied with her husband in the struggle against the repressive regime, chooses to remain behind rather than joining her parents, siblings, and her own infant son on their journey to Toronto and the beginning of a new life in yet another alien land. The family’s fears about her fate give birth to a secret that will reverberate in their lives decades later. Oza subtly observes the shift from practices like arranged marriages to unions that are the product of romantic attachments and trusts her readers to acclimate themselves. In intimate domestic scenes and scenes of societies in turmoil, she displays a sure-handed ability to write at both small and large scale and to portray with deep sympathy the universal human desire to find “a little place to simply exist, freely, and with dignity.” An ambitious family drama skillfully explores the bonds of kinship and the yearning for peace and security.
Survey #12
Rivera Garza, Cristina: Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice* (2023)
* 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir-Autobiography
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: In this gut-wrenching blend of memoir and reportage, Rivera Garza (No One Will See Me Cry), a Hispanic studies professor at the University of Houston, investigates her younger sister Liliana’s 1990 murder by an abusive ex-boyfriend, who remains at large. Placing her sister’s death in the context of the femicide crisis in Mexico, Rivera Garza interweaves startling facts and statistics (an average of 10 women are killed per day in Mexico) with lyrical meditations on her family life and Liliania’s efforts to break away from her obsessive high school boyfriend, Ángel González Ramos. Liliana’s oft-repeated desire not to be left alone haunts the narrative, as do Rivera Garza’s guilt and shame over her sister’s death. Documenting the meticulous detective work of recreating the years and months leading up to Liliana’s murder, Rivera Garcia interweaves case files and newspaper accounts with excerpts from Liliana’s teenage diary, where the early warning signs about Ángel appear. Thoughout, Rivera Garza laments how she and Liliana’s friends lacked “the insight, the language, that would allow us to identify the signs of danger,” and explores “how patriarchy deforms and hurts men, as much as it does women.” This piercing remembrance hits home.
Survey #13
Sarr, Mohammed Mbougar, and Lara Vergnaud: The Most Secret Memory of Men* (2021/2023)
* 2021 Prix Goncourt
Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: A struggling Senegalese novelist falls deeper and deeper into a shadowy maze of literature and history. At the heart of this tale of literary identity is the mysterious (and fictional) Senegalese author T.C. Elimane and his 1938 novel, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity, a book that narrator and struggling 21st-century novelist Diégane Latyr Faye believes to be so brilliant, so profound that, upon reading it, “violent, pure life would come coursing back through your veins.” In the midst of trying to write his own masterpiece, Faye, also Senegalese and Paris-based, encourages his clique of writers to help him raise the banner for Labyrinth as a lost, liberating work of African literature. Upon researching the novel’s murky history, Faye discovers that it had incited polarizing debate in francophone Africa’s literary coteries. From what he can tell, the work pierced Parisian society like a bullet, made a harrowing mark, then disappeared along with its author. Faye decides he must find out what happened to Elimane while searching for the truth of his own murky identity. In time, he questions whether literature for him is a sort of windowpane, or even a shield, behind which he shelters in avoidance of life’s “battering ram to the gut.” Sarr investigates with keen psychological detail Faye’s and Elimane’s “foreign”-ness, their oft-patronized “exoticism,” their battles with the realities of homeland and the non-being of expatriate life in France. Faye’s and his peers’ tipsiness before the lure of lasting fame, or at least Instagram notoriety, the constant hum of gossip by which they are encircled, the bitter critical dismissals—all the elements of the writer’s consciousness are set out painstakingly. In the end, to whom who can Faye be faithful? How will he define himself, particularly on those nights when the sky, like Elimane’s chef-d’oeuvre, is “a labyrinth too, and it’s no less inhuman than the labyrinth of the earth”? Translated by Vergnaud, Sarr’s novel, though self-conscious and on occasion self-indulgent, nevertheless justifies itself as the winner of the 2021 Prix Goncourt, one of France’s most prestigious literary prizes. Despite its self-fascination, a novel of undoubtable prowess.
Survey #14
Sinclair, Safiya: How to Say Babylon: A Memoir (2023)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: Poet Sinclair (Cannibal) recounts her harrowing upbringing in Jamaica in this bruising memoir. Forbidden by her militant Rastafarian father from talking to friends or wearing pants or jewelry, Sinclair and her sisters were subject to his unpredictable whims and rage. After her mother gifted 10-year-old Sinclair a book of poems, she turned to writing poetry, drawn to the medium’s structure and emotive capabilities: “In the chaos of our rented house, the poem was order.” With the help of scholarships, she attended a prestigious private school in Jamaica to study poetry, and eventually left for college in America (the proverbial “Babylon” of the title, and the main target of her father’s rage), where she funneled her conflicted feelings about the move into her work: “I try to write the ache into something tangible.” In dazzling prose (“There was no one and nothing ahead of me now but the unending waves, the sky outpouring its wide expanse of horizon, and all this beckoning blue”), she examines the traumas of her childhood against the backdrop of her new life as a poet in Babylon, declining to vilify her father even as she questions whether a relationship with him might be salvageable. Readers will be drawn to Sinclair’s strength and swept away by her tale of triumph over oppression. This is a tour de force.
Survey #15
Thanki, Asha: A Thousand Times Before (2024)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: Thanki debuts with a gorgeous fantastical tale of family history and political strife, spanning from the 1947 Partition of India to the present. It’s told by Ayukta, a Brooklyn artist, to her partner, Nadya, by way of explaining why she’s hesitant to have children. Ayukta’s family has an ancient magical tapestry, and when a new family member is sewn into it, the person receives the ability to shape the future. As Ayukta gradually reveals over the course of the novel, the special powers conferred by the tapestry can be a curse. She begins the story with her grandmother, Amla, growing up in Karachi when the Partition throws daily life into disarray. Amla’s mother, Chandini, sews Amla’s image into the tapestry, but she is unable to explain the gift to Amla before dying in a sectarian riot. When Amla’s friend is raped, Amla inadvertently kills the rapist by depicting his death in a painting, and suspicion falls on her father after police find the painting in their house. Later, Amla passes the gift on to her more cautious daughter, Vibha, rather than to Ayukta’s mother, Arni, drawing Arni’s outrage. Thanki threads her saga with rich themes, including mother-daughter tensions, the burden of inheritance, and the power of art. Readers won’t want this to end.
Survey #16
Trabucco Zerán, Alia, and Sophie Hughes: Clean (2022/2024)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: Chilean writer Zerán (The Remainder) delivers a propulsive story of class differences in Santiago. After Julia, the young daughter of a successful doctor and lawyer, is found dead, having drowned in the family’s pool, Estela, their longtime maid, is brought in for questioning. Sitting in an interrogation room, Estela recounts her decision to leave her home in her mid-30s to find work in the capital and divulges information about her employers. She describes stumbling upon them having sex in the dining room and retreating when they notice her, after which their cries get much louder. In addition to cleaning, she’s forced to double as a nanny for the “fragile” Julia, and she learns secrets about the family, such as the mother’s use of birth control pills and antidepressants. Zerán employs Estela as the novel’s lone narrator, smartly crafting a version of events that suggests the maid’s innocence, even as Estela admits to bottling her rage, leaving the reader to wonder whether Julia’s death was accidental, a suicide, or murder. Though Estela’s recollections become repetitive as the novel’s climax nears, Zerán keeps up the momentum with short chapters and Estela’s appealingly snappy voice (she frequently tells her interrogators to “write this down”). This is bursting with intrigue.
Survey #17
Trías, Fernanda, and Heather Cleary: Pink Slime (2017/2024)
Review: ©Kirkus Reviews: A town is decimated by a horrifying epidemic in this dark novel. The second novel by Uruguayan author Trías to be translated into English—following The Rooftop (2021)—begins with a suffocating sense of doom and doesn’t let up from there. The unnamed narrator, living in a port town in an unnamed country, describes the aftermath of a destructive algae bloom that’s choking the life out of the area: “Under each unbroken surface, mold cleaved silent through wood, rust bored into metal. Everything was rotting. We were, too.” She recounts the early moments of the epidemic, when a massive fish kill gave an indication that something was wrong; the divers dispatched to investigate the cause all lost their lives to the disease, which causes its victims’ skin to peel from their bodies. The townspeople who have chosen to remain are forced to endure power outages and food shortages, with many only able to eat a processed food called “Meatrite”—the “pink slime” of the title. The narrator has regular contact with only three people: her mother, with whom she is engaged in an “eternal skirmish”; Max, her ex-husband, hospitalized and suffering from a chronic case of the disease; and Mauro, the boy she babysits, who has a syndrome that causes him to always be hungry. The narrator knows the situation isn’t going to improve anytime soon, and Trías captures her resigned dread perfectly. This is a stunningly dark novel, but a beautiful one; Trías’ prose and Cleary’s translation perfectly capture what it feels like to live in an epidemic: “It’s hard for me to describe time in confinement, because if anything characterized those periods it was the sensation of existing in a kind of non-time. We lived in a constant state of anticipation, but we weren’t waiting for anything in particular.” This is a knockout of a story. Stunning writing makes this a startlingly powerful novel.
Survey #18
Wainaina, Binyavanga: How to Write About Africa: Collected Works (2023)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: This brilliant collection brings together incisive essays by the late Kenyan journalist Wainaina (1971–2019) on his life and Africa’s place in the world. In “A Foreigner in Cape Town,” Wainaina (One Day I Will Write About This Place) discusses the xenophobia he faced after emigrating from Kenya to South Africa and laments the racist double standard that “white expatriates in South Africa don’t get accused of stealing jobs.” Pushing back against Westerners who dismiss African cuisine as “bland and uninspired,” Wainaina explains how African culinary traditions influenced those outside the continent and serves up recipes for mango salad and “Swahili braised chicken.” The author shows off his talent for withering satire in the standout “How to Be a Dictator” (“be the richest man in your country” and “make America and China happy”) and “How to Write About Africa,” which critiques the racist tropes that accompany depictions of the continent (“treat Africa as if it was one country,” and avoid “ordinary domestic scenes… references to African writers or intellectuals”). Other pieces discuss the paternalism of foreign aid, the tension between regional and international cultures in Nairobi, and the author’s travels to Sudan, Togo, and Uganda, each showcasing Wainaina’s sharp wit and penetrating analysis. This fittingly sums up the considerable abilities of a talent lost too soon.
Survey #19
Wong, Edward: At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China (2024)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: The upheavals that drove China’s diaspora are revisited in this resonant and moving debut. New York Times journalist Wong recaps his father Yook Kearn’s experiences of China’s 20th-century tumults, beginning with the 1942 Japanese invasion that forced him from Hong Kong to his family’s ancestral village of Hap Wo in Guangdong province, where he weathered the war. The 1949 Communist victory in the Chinese civil war imbued him with revolutionary ardor, and he joined the military. But his bourgeois family background got him expelled from the air force and posted to China’s northwestern frontier, where he observed the tension between ethnic Han settlers and the region’s Muslim Uyghurs. In 1957 Yook Kearn entered college to become an aircraft engineer, but again his suspect class background undermined his ambitions. After enduring semistarvation during the famine of 1958–1962, he left for Hong Kong and eventually America. Wong intersperses Yook Kearn’s travails with his own reporting on China’s 21st-century economic boom, his visits to a depopulated Hap Wo, and the government’s imprisonment of a million Uyghurs in internment camps. Wong’s narrative of his father’s life conveys a grinding oppression and thwarted opportunities. It’s also an affecting elegy for the loss of tradition and familial solidarity wrought by immigration and breakneck change. This illuminates the human cost of China’s revolutionary century.
Survey #20
Yovanovitch, Marie L: Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir (2022)
Review: ©Publishers Weekly: The former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who got unwillingly caught up in Donald Trump’s first impeachment, examines corruption abroad and at home in this stinging memoir. Yovanovitch was removed from her ambassadorship in Kiev in 2019 amid fabricated accusations of collusion with Ukrainian figures to subvert the 2016 U.S. presidential election and claims that she “had spoken with ‘disdain’ about the Trump administration.” As she writes, the allegations arose from efforts by Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani and a Ukrainian prosecutor to tar candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter with insinuations of corrupt dealings in Ukraine. Yovanovitch gives a gripping account of this Kafkaesque scandal, complete with Trump’s drive-by tweets—“Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad”—and her moving testimony at congressional impeachment hearings. She sets it within an engrossing recap of her diplomatic career in postings to Somalia and ex-Soviet nations, during which she was subjected to sexist indignities (while ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, she was asked by a press attaché to serve cookies to a reporter) and enmeshed in wrangles to promote reforms aimed at bolstering human rights and reducing rampant corruption in foreign governments (and, eventually, America’s). Full of shrewd insights and bitter ironies, Yovanovitch’s saga offers a revealing insider’s take on the labyrinth of foreign policy and on one of the most sordid episodes of Trump’s presidency.
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