From Publishers Weekly
In 1983, at age seven, Asgedom and his family arrived in this country under the sponsorship of World Relief, a U.S.-based Christian organization that helps refugees from all over the world resettle here. Having fled the Eritrean and Ethiopian conflict, Asgedom and his parents and three siblings had spent the previous three years in a refugee camp in Sudan, then in the throes of a civil war. This earnest account of his life up to his graduation from Harvard is peppered with powerful moments. The opening description of his family's flight recalls the media images of Ethiopia in the 1980s: skeletal children trailing across a war-torn, drought-ridden land. Those images aroused great sympathy in American viewers, who nonetheless remained comfortably remote. That one of those children would land in an American suburb, grow up on welfare, earn an Ivy League degree and publish a memoir at first elicits a kind of cognitive dissonance. But Asgedom soon familiarizes us with his family's experience. Much of the book consists of anecdotal recollections of schoolyard pranks and fights that illustrate an immigrant family's experience in a Chicago suburb, although the telling can be rote and gives short shrift to key periods of Asgedom's life. We learn almost nothing, for instance, about his Harvard years, and little about his life before coming to the States. In the end, the book seems only a sketch of a life full of drama and courage. (Mar.)Forecast: Asgedom now works full-time as an inspirational speaker at venues ranging from schools and churches to Fortune 500 companies, which should provide him with a small but devoted readership.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
When he was four years old, Asgedom's family left their war-ravaged home in Ethiopia. They spent three years in a Sudanese refugee camp before coming to the U.S. in 1983, where they were settled by World Relief in a wealthy white suburb near Chicago. He later earned a full scholarship to Harvard, where in 1999 he delivered the commencement address. His simple lyrical narrative, both wry and tender, stays true to the child's viewpoint as he grows up, taunted at school, but pretty bad and rough himself. His coming-of-age story is both darkened and enriched by the stories he hears about his parents' lives back home and by the pieces he remembers. At the center of the book is his father, a fierce family disciplinarian, once an all-powerful medical assistant at home, now reduced to a "beetle," unemployed, half-blind, raging at his dependency. Only at the very end, when Asgedom spells out the metaphor of the title, does the message overwhelm the story. What stays with you is the quiet, honest drama of a family's heartrending journey.
Hazel RochmanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
