Status
Call number
Publication
DDC/MDS
305.4895 |
Description
Biography & Autobiography. Literary Criticism. Sociology. Nonfiction. HTML:NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER � PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST � NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER � ONE OF TIME�S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE � A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness �Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human.��Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen In development as a television series starring and adapted by Greta Lee � One of Time�s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year � Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, New Statesman, BuzzFeed, Esquire, The New York Public Library, and Book Riot Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative�and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world. Binding these essays together is Hong�s theory of �minor feelings.� As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these �minor feelings� occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality�when you believe the lies you�re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they�re dissonant�and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her. With sly humor and a poet�s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche�and of a writer�s search to both uncover and speak the truth. Praise for Minor Feelings �Hong begins her new book of essays with a bang. . . .The essays wander a variegated terrain of memoir, criticism and polemic, oscillating between smooth proclamations of certainty and twitches of self-doubt. . . . Minor Feelings is studded with moments [of] candor and dark humor shot through with glittering self-awareness.��The New York Times �Hong uses her own experiences as a jumping off point to examine race and emotion in the United States.��Newsweek �Powerful . . . [Hong] brings together memoiristic personal essay and reflection, historical accounts and modern reporting, and other works of art and writing, in order to amplify a multitude of voices and capture Asian America as a collection of contradictions. She does so with sharp wit and radical transparency.��Salon.… (more)
User reviews
I read the first half in one sitting--it was great to read a different perspective--though I would be classed by many as coming from the same group (Asian Americans, just
The second half for me stalled a little--I don't know if I'd just lost the momentum, or if I just didn't connect as much to the subject content, but it was still easy enough to read through and finish (props again to the author's writing!). Overall, I'll continue to recommend this book to anyone who might be interested.
I appreciated how Park used the stories of others as well as her own. Her deconstruction of Richard Pryor was spectacular as were her narratives and interpretations of the lives and sanitized legacies of other artists and revolutionaries. She may want to lay off the Amiri Baraka. She may have chosen to sanitize that legacy herself, forgetting his violent misogyny and antisemitism. Shame on a poet whose whole life is built on the importance of language for lionizing and quoting as gospel (repeatedly in this book) the words of a man who wrote:
"Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew...I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured"
It doesn't mean he did not write and do important things, but he was no antidote to Trump, he was just as malignant, just less powerful.
All in all Minor Feelings is brilliant, wide ranging but still cohesive, instructive, beautifully written. (Her discussions of shaping her second language to her will, assaulting the orthodoxy of language was one of my favorite themes. I have often thought Nabokov did the same, that he created beautiful prose by attacking rather than embracing his new tongue.) I believe building authentic understanding is the greatest thing a writer can do. Park has done that. Every American should read this book.
Each chapter is an essay:
United
Stand up
The end of white innocence
Bad English
An education
Portrait of an artist
The indebted
The essay which was
I was really intrigued by all the female relationships touched upon in "An education" and I wanted to learn more about these artist friends of the author.
I read this during a readathon, and while it was amazing to sit down and read this in one sitting, I would love to come back to this someday when I can spend ore time with each essay, because there's SO MUCH to unpack here.
Very worthwhile.