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Top of the pile
75
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
55/100Critics
94/100Scholars
Author:
Albert Samaha
Publisher:
Riverhead Books
Date:
October 12, 2021
A journalist's account of the forces steering the fate of his sprawling Filipinx-American family reframes the immigrant experience. Tracing his family's history through the region's unique geopolitical roots in Spanish colonialism, American intervention, and Japanese occupation, Samaha fits their arc into the wider story of global migration as determined by chess moves among superpowers.
What The Reviewers Say
Concepcion 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.
... a sprawling and impressive work.
If Concepcion were only about Samaha’s mother, it would already be wholly worthwhile. But she was one of eight children in the Concepcion family, whose ancestry Samaha traces in this sprawling and powerful book back to the sultanates that preceded the Spanish Empire’s arrival in the Philippines.
... a captivating, thoughtful, classification-defying read.
