THE NEW MILLIONS: 1/4: A Beginner's Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious by Roya Hakakian
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2024
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Beginners-Guide-America-Immigrant-Curious/dp/0525656065/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1622853677&sr=1-1
A stirring, witty, and poignant glimpse into the bewildering American immigrant experience from someone who has lived it. Also, a mirror held up to America.
Into the maelstrom of unprecedented contemporary debates about immigrants in the United States, this perfectly timed book gives us a portrait of what the new immigrant experience in America is really like. Written as a "guide" for the newly arrived, and providing "practical information and advice," Roya Hakakian, an immigrant herself, reveals what those who settle here love about the country, what they miss about their homes, the cruelty of some Americans, and the unceasing generosity of others. She captures the texture of life in a new place in all its complexity, laying bare both its beauty and its darkness as she discusses race, sex, love, death, consumerism, and what it is like to be from a country that is in America's crosshairs. Her tenderly perceptive and surprisingly humorous account invites us to see ourselves as we appear to others, making it possible for us to rediscover our many American gifts through the perspective of the outsider. In shattering myths and embracing painful contradictions that are unique to this place,A Beginner's Guide to America is Hakakian's candid love letter to America
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everyone this is James Harkin and Anna Tashinsky two writers of the TV show |
| 0:05.2 | QI and two-fourths of the hit podcast no such thing as a fish. |
| 0:09.2 | We'd like to let you know that we've written a book it is called everything to play for the most |
| 0:14.4 | interesting things there are to know about the world of sports it's for you |
| 0:18.2 | whether you like sports or not did you know that legendary cricketer Gary Sobers scored his final century while drunk? |
| 0:25.7 | Or that games of lacrosse used to involve 100,000 players. |
| 0:31.7 | Learn that and so much more by getting everything to play for the QI Book of Sports available |
| 0:36.2 | in all bookshops and online right now. This is CBS I am the world. |
| 0:44.0 | This is CBS I on the World with John Bachelor. |
| 0:48.0 | Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:51.0 | This is CBS I am the world. I'm John Bachelor and it's a pleasure to welcome the author |
| 0:56.9 | Roya Hakean. Her new book, A Beginner's Guide to America for the Immigrant and the Curious. |
| 1:04.1 | Roya is an Immigrant to America from a country of my grandfather and grandmother's |
| 1:10.6 | birth once upon a time Persia and many versions before that, but now known |
| 1:16.0 | as Iran. |
| 1:17.7 | And her story gives us an understanding of what it is to arrive not only from Iran but from around the world to modern America. |
| 1:26.0 | We begin the storytelling with a day that Roya chronicles in her book in an ethnic food store somewhere in New York and she's shopping |
| 1:37.8 | and she observes a couple from Iran who are newly arrived. I think six weeks and four days is the detail that |
| 1:46.1 | emerges and they're puzzling over a piece of meat in the frozen meat counter because they |
| 1:51.2 | can't read the label and Roya goes up to them to offer her help. |
| 1:56.0 | Roya, congratulations and a very good evening to you and thank you for this. |
| 2:01.0 | This young couple, you're observing, you go to help them and you immediately fall into their |
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