RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewUnflinching and humane ... The depictions of life in the brothel are simple, merciless and deeply affecting ... Ichi and her peers find hope in organized resistance, with their collective humanity in the face of brutality forming Murata’s irrefutable and beautiful argument.
Sonali Deraniyagala
RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleDeraniyagala\'s new book, Wave, is, most profoundly, an answer to the question of how one can hold on to the knowledge of a world that preceded disaster ... She remembers her remembering, and then gives us her mind moving, in the present tense, to an image of one of her loved ones ... Each springs to vivid life through the particular window of her mourning ... As the book progresses, both Deraniyagala and the prose itself begin to re-engage with the natural world, and with the sensory pleasures in which her boys had reveled.
Anuradha Bhagwati
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewBhagwati’s memoir, Unbecoming, offers a distinctive lens on the Marines: She is South Asian, bisexual and a forceful, frank writer ... Bhagwati writes beautifully about the body, describing everything from the pleasures of the basketball court to martial arts training in the Marine Corps with brutal clarity ... This book also has some of the best descriptions I’ve read of what it is like to be the only woman of color in a roomful of white men ... But Bhagwati’s book stands out most as a chronicle of overcoming psychological trauma. She assesses the authorities with a matter-of-factness that excludes neither the emotional pain of discrimination nor the persistent pull of those in power ... She offers critiques of politicians, the military, her fellow veterans and the media. But she does not lapse into self-righteousness because she does not spare herself. The book is at its most powerful when she writes about who she became in response to the violence the military trained her to commit. Ultimately, Unbecoming is a chronicle of letting that violence go.
