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I Hotel (2010)

by Karen Tei Yamashita(Favorite Author)

3.7 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1566892392 (ISBN13: 9781566892391)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Coffee House Press

review 1: Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel, recently nominated for a National Book Award, is a series of ten novellas set in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. The novel's cast of characters includes: a Filipino farm worker who claims he was once a chef for John Steinbeck, Mo Akagi, a Japanese American activist modeled after Richard Aoki, and an avant-garde choreographer named Sandy Hu. Many of the characters are tied to the Third World Liberation Front, a coalition of student activists who fought for ethnic studies programs at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University, or the International Hotel, the residence of elderly Filipino and Chinese men who were forcibly evicted in 1968. Meticulously researched by Yamashita over a period of ten years,... more I Hotel is a surprising, expansive, funny, and chaotic story of the Asian American movers and shakers of the Civil Rights Era.
review 2: Yup, this is going nowhere, the words discordant and meandering come to mind. I think the subject matter is interesting, but the writing is jarring and seemed to be trying to be smart in the sort of way that comes off as irritating cool kid who knows everything and is super cultural, man (and yes that is some sarcasm right there). Hope some day someone actually approaches Yamashita's subject with better vision of what they are writing about. less

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