Cons: Reads like a HS tome and is poorly referenced.
The Bottom Line: Students need tools and methodologies for understanding a multicultural world, not a mind-numbing treatise on how intolerant the US is.
mistsy's Full Review: Myron W. Lustig - AmongUS: Essays On Identity , Be...
This book is supposedly a college text but more appropriately would be used in a HS social studies class. The book is focused narrowly on the US, consisting merely of a set of somewhat random essays on people dealing with their multiculturalism within the context of the United States.
The book uses such Miss South Carolina terms like "US Americans". It concentrates on a utopia of magic "multiculturalism" in the US as if the country weren't already, and always has been, multicultural.
There are essays about being a Pacific Islander in the US - nice, but how about teaching students about other cultures and developing strategies for understanding others rather than this 'stream of consciousness' hippy approach?
There is no schrift given to being anything but a minority in the book and thus it 'celebrates' itself as 'giving voice' to those whose voices 'otherwise cannot be heard'. It's hard to swallow all this puffery and it leaves the educated reader feeling like he or she has just slogged through a swamp of contemporarily accepted newspeak that is short on theory and long on holding hands and singing kumbaya.
Where the book does point out difficulties in achieving muliticulturalism it seems to forget that there is a long and successful history of immigration to the United States and not every past moment of our history in sullied by 'failed' attempts at multiculturalism.
The book further denies any right or premise for being a proud US American. I'm not saying blind patriot here but rather suggesting that there is a lot more to be proud of in this nation than this collection of not-very-much footnoted or reference tome.
The book fails completely to recognize that there is an American culture and that sacrificing this to become a faceless and soulless 'rainbow' of multiculturalism might fade that coveted rainbow into a boring ecru, taupe, or suede.
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