RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewConcepcion puts us forcefully and unapologetically on the hook of U.S. imperial history and its role in shaping Filipino and American identity — and never lets us off ... Taking us far from the boorish anti-imperialist cursing of a schoolyard Caliban, Concepcion tells a sophisticated tale. Samaha, a journalist who now works as the inequality editor at BuzzFeed, combines meticulous research into the epic of Spanish, U.S. and other great powers’ colonization of the Philippines with the more intimate story of his mother’s family, the Concepcions, with whom he grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area ... At the bighearted center of Concepcion is Samaha’s desire \'to honor my elders who built the foundation I was born onto, and to offer an account of their journeys for the historical record.\' Here he succeeds ably, putting a human face and history on a huge, but mostly faceless community largely left out of the Asian American canon and U.S. literature generally ... invites us into the family’s living room conversation in the industrial suburb of Vallejo. In the process, we become privy to the manner in which two separate but linked political phenomena — the colonial history of the Philippines and the resurgence of the radical right in the United States — act as a vise grip on the hearts and minds of our relatives who support extremists like Trump ... is at its best when it shares the lessons Filipinos have to teach those of us grappling with life in a kingdom of the north whose growing divisions between rich and poor, and politics of extremism, increasingly resemble those it fostered and still supports in the global south ... In places, Samaha’s passion for history on an epic scale overwhelms his more intimate family story, slowing his narrative and diluting its emotional heft. His book left me wanting more of the dramatic yet homey scenes featuring him and his mother, and more of the very physical but politically subtle storytelling that characterizes other recent narratives of Filipino American experience ... Samaha is to be admired for taking on the exceptionally difficult task of navigating the abyss of imperial history in order to make clear its invisible but destiny-altering pull on all of us. Concepcion does for readers what André did for me, teaching us to curse at empire but with the one-two punch of epic and intimate history.
