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Top of the pile
85
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
90/100Critics
80/100Scholars
Author:
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Publisher:
Grove Press
Date:
October 3, 2023
Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.
What The Reviewers Say
An artfully intertwined medley of Nguyen's essays, lectures and interviews, A Man of Two Faces...is an innovative expose of the racism that shackles refugee populations of color to harmful stereotypes.
It’s a lot of terrain to cover, and the stretches of impersonal polemic are just that — so unspecific they risk banality.
Formally audacious.
Constant vigilance helps Nguyen develop a critical distance when assessing his refugee history against a multivalent context.
