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.

Ineluctable.

Many-faceted, stylistically complex, eviscerating, and tender montage of memoir, facts, dissent, and clarification.

Nguyen blazes a nonlinear, literary way through the histories of Vietnam and the US, his parents’ arduous lives in each and his own struggles to find his voice as citizen, son and writer..

Kaleidoscopic.