Family Ties: Sometimes You Have to Travel to Find Your Way Home.

by Gaiutra Bahadur

CHILDREN's NONFICTION, Grades 6-12.

A paired profile of President Barack Obama and the author Amy Tan, Family Ties focuses on the relationship of each figure with a difficult parent, their respective journeys to that parent”s native country and their attempts to resolve their identity crises through writing.

Part of the publisher's ON THE RECORD series by journalists.

112 pages, Unknown Binding

First published September 1, 2011

About the author

Gaiutra Bahadur is an American writer. She is the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, a personal history of indenture shortlisted in 2014 for the Orwell Prize, the British literary prize for artful political writing. Her debut fiction, the short story “The Stained Veil,” appears in the anthology Go Home! (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2018).

Gaiutra was born in Guyana and emigrated with her family to Jersey City, New Jersey when she was six years old. A lyric essay previewing her current book project, which explores the idea of America through its 20th-century entanglements with her home country, runs in the current issue of the Australian literary magazine The Griffith Review. Entitled “Tales of the Sea,” it is also reprinted in the anthology We Mark Your Memory.

She is a critic, essayist and journalist. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Ms. Magazine, Dissent, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The Washington Post and elsewhere, as well as in the essay anthologies Nonstop Metropolis and Living on the Edge of the World.

Reviews

[Nikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked learning about the two people that this book features, which is Barack Obama, a former US President, and Amy Tan, a famous writer. Both people struggle with their identity, in part because of a parent. Barack Obama wished to learn more about his father, who was from Kenya. He did not see much of him during his childhood. Amy Tan's mother was a Chinese woman raising her family in America and Amy wanted nothing to do with her Chinese heritage. Amy had the opposite problem that Obama had in that her mother was there too much.
Both Barack and Amy traveled to their parent's homeland. For Barack it was Kenya and for Amy it was China. There, they learned more about their family history and it helped them to understand their parents and that part of themselves that was missing. It makes me want to learn more about my family heritage. It was a good and quick read. The grade level for reading this is around 6th grade.

[Troy Fanton]

2 Copies

[Courtney Bedrava · Rating 3 out of 5]

meh