THE NEW MILLIONS: 4/4: 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
⏱️ 10 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 a CBS I on the World, I'm John Bachelor, conversation with Roya Hakakian, the author, her new book, A Begin, |
| 0:51.0 | A Beginner's Guide to America for the Immigrant and the Curious. |
| 0:55.0 | Diplomacy. The U.S. and Iran have been at odds and it looks like a war, it talks like a war, it acts like a war, it's a war since |
| 1:04.3 | 1979 since the revolution. And Roy has written, many have written of the |
| 1:09.9 | outrageous perpetrated by the mullahs, by the regime in Tehran. |
| 1:15.0 | And yet, maintaining diplomatic relations is the ambition of states that are at odds. |
| 1:22.0 | Geopolitics insists upon it. |
| 1:24.0 | The puzzle for the immigrant is what to make of the news. |
| 1:28.0 | You want to be an American citizen. |
| 1:31.0 | Your ambition is to be naturalized American citizen. Your ambition is to be naturalized American citizen. And yet in the news |
| 1:36.0 | all the time is the threat of war with your native land. Roya writes the wonderful image, you're a twilight citizen, you're neither this or that, |
| 1:45.6 | you're somewhere in between, especially while you're waiting to be naturalized. |
| 1:49.9 | Roya, it is easy to condemn Iran for its human rights as it was easy in 1875. It's easy now |
| 1:57.3 | at the same time we main the US seeks diplomatic relations as seeks all the time Iran in the news. |
| 2:05.2 | How does the immigrant hear tension between his adopted land America and his native land. It doesn't have to be Iran, it could be Venezuela, |
... |
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