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The I Index

Floating in a Most Peculiar Way: A Memoir

Next in the queue

56

/100

I Index Overall Rating

Readers

31/100

Critics

81/100

Scholars

N/A

Author:

Louis Chude-Sokei

Publisher:

Mariner Books

Date:

February 2, 2021

The director of Boston University’s African American studies explores how his complicated life history—from living in the short-lived African nation of Biafra, to Jamaica, to the harshest streets of Los Angeles—has woven his even more complex identity.

What The Reviewers Say

Ijeoma Oluo,
The New York Times Book Review
... Chude-Sokei writes from that space outside, detailing with unflinching directness the confusion, isolation, horror and bizarre humor of his life as a child born to a high-ranking Biafran major father and a Jamaican mother in the midst of civil war in Nigeria.
Katya Cengel,
The New York Journal of Books
From the start it is clear Floating in a Most Peculiar Way is going to be a journey of discovery like few others.
Henry L. Carrigan Jr.,
BookPage
Searching for one’s identity can be a vertiginous experience, especially for an immigrant shuffling from one culture to another. In Floating in a Most Peculiar Way, Louis Chude-Sokei cannily captures this tumbling free fall through a variety of cultures as he negotiates what it means to be African in Jamaica and the United States.
Kathy Sexton,
Booklist
... absorbing.