- Paperback: 332 pages
- Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing; 1 edition (29 Jan 2004)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1857883381
- ISBN-13: 978-1857883381
- Product Dimensions: 22.4 x 15 x 2.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
195,140 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #35 in Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Sociology > Family & Social Groups > Age Groups > Children
Unrooted Childhoods
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Product Description
Product Description
A fusion of voices and deeply personal experiences from every corner of the globe, Unrooted Childhoods presents a cultural mosaic of today's citizens of the world. In twenty stirring memoirs of childhoods spent packing, writings by both world-famous and first-time authors (many published here for the first time) make universal the story of growing up without the opportunity to ever feel rooted. Best-selling fiction and non-fiction authors Isabel Allende, Carlos Fuentes, Pat Conroy, Pico Iyer and Ariel Dorfman contribute powerful and deeply personal accounts of mobile childhoods and the cultural experiences they engender. The memoirs touch on both the benefits and the difficulties of growing up in the ever changing landscape of diplomatic, military and other expatriate communities.
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First Sentence
To children who successfully navigate a lifetime of change, the world is a garden of exotic gifts, a house of treasures to explore and take in. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt
To children who successfully navigate a lifetime of change, the world is a garden of exotic gifts, a house of treasures to explore and take in. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
24 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book can be read on many levels. On a basic level, it can be read merely as a collection of entertaining stories of the childhoods of various people. On deeper level, it can be seen as a fasinating study into how the cultures in which we grow up shape our adult lives; and how children with no particular affiliation towards any country forge their own identities.
In this age where travel has never been easier and people are increasingly mobile, this book poses the question - what does nationality actually mean, and what happens when that is taken away? An important book for our time.
In this age where travel has never been easier and people are increasingly mobile, this book poses the question - what does nationality actually mean, and what happens when that is taken away? An important book for our time.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
What can I say - this is one of my favorite books. Read it. I recommend it for any nomad, explorer, cross-cultural kid or traveler. It is a fantastic insight into the psychology of global nomads. I would give it six stars, it is truly excellent.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
33 of 35 people found the following review helpful
Unrooted - Real, Rich, Rewarding - Read It
30 Nov 2003
Format:Paperback
The Publisher's Weekly paragraph reads more like a tenth grader's bored attempt to complete an assignment than an adult's intelligent reading of this rich collection of essays on the experience of growing up as an extra-cultural (variant of extraterrestrial).
In this one collection you will find not only the best of the internationally known literati who write about this experience (Pico Ayer, Isabelle Allende, Carlos Fuente...) but also the fresh and vibrant writings of lesser known yet equally powerful writers (Faith Eidse, Sara Taber, Camilla Trinchieri ...) To conclude saying the essays focus on misery is like concluding that trees take space; it is almost irrelevant. These essays are first hand accounts of the powerful experience of an international education, of opening one's mind to otherness, of finding a center in the whirlwind of mobility and the extremes of cultures that co-exist on earth.
In these writings, you feel what it was like to be there - you taste, and smell and see and hear, as if you were there. No matter your own experience - whether you lived in the same neighborhood for 21 years, or moved every six months for the first six - the experiences shared will shine a light no less stunning than the vistas from mountaintops or streams of sunlight through clouds. The vitality of the prose is the written equivalent of music videos. You will want to mark your copy up, share it with friends and then write your own experience.
This text will become a standard in high school and college classes on a fresh dimension of multiculturalism. The life giving force of these personal essays is the material from which evolutions in transnational culture are emerging. Kudos to those who brought it to fruition.
In this one collection you will find not only the best of the internationally known literati who write about this experience (Pico Ayer, Isabelle Allende, Carlos Fuente...) but also the fresh and vibrant writings of lesser known yet equally powerful writers (Faith Eidse, Sara Taber, Camilla Trinchieri ...) To conclude saying the essays focus on misery is like concluding that trees take space; it is almost irrelevant. These essays are first hand accounts of the powerful experience of an international education, of opening one's mind to otherness, of finding a center in the whirlwind of mobility and the extremes of cultures that co-exist on earth.
In these writings, you feel what it was like to be there - you taste, and smell and see and hear, as if you were there. No matter your own experience - whether you lived in the same neighborhood for 21 years, or moved every six months for the first six - the experiences shared will shine a light no less stunning than the vistas from mountaintops or streams of sunlight through clouds. The vitality of the prose is the written equivalent of music videos. You will want to mark your copy up, share it with friends and then write your own experience.
This text will become a standard in high school and college classes on a fresh dimension of multiculturalism. The life giving force of these personal essays is the material from which evolutions in transnational culture are emerging. Kudos to those who brought it to fruition.
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Eye-opening accounts of global childhoods
22 Jan 2004
Format:Paperback
This book can be read on many levels. On a basic level, it can be read merely as a collection of entertaining stories of the childhoods of various people. On deeper level, it can be seen as a fascinating study into how the cultures in which we grow up shape our adult lives; and how children with no particular affiliation towards any country forge their own identities.
In this age where travel has never been easier and people are increasingly mobile, this book poses the question - what does nationality actually mean, and what happens when that is taken away? An important book for our time.
In this age where travel has never been easier and people are increasingly mobile, this book poses the question - what does nationality actually mean, and what happens when that is taken away? An important book for our time.
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful
A revealing anthology of personal memoirs
7 Mar 2004
Format:Paperback
Expertly co-edited by Faith Eidse and Nina Sichel, Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs Of Growing Up Global is a revealing anthology of personal memoirs drawn from a wide variety of authors, each of whom focus upon the experience of growing up without being able to "put down roots" of belonging. Many of these thoughtful and thought-provoking essays are published here for the first time. They reflect the link between language and cultural identity, as well as the framing the travails of adolescence in North America, South America, and Africa, offering the reader a impressive collection of uniquely human voices identifying the dehumanizing cultural homogenization that globalization tends to unilaterally spread. Unrooted Childhoods is a seminal and highly recommended contribution to contemporary sociology, cultural history, social issues, and autobiography reading lists.
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