When Ahamed arrived in suburban Boston in 1970, she felt \u201can acute sense of disappointment,\u201d she writes. \u201cWhat were these quaint, old-fashioned houses doing in the land that had sent men and rocket ships to the moon?\u201d The silence of her new home made her long for the noise and liveliness of her native India. In the ensuing decades, her opinions changed\u2014so much so that she was inspired to write a book about her adopted country and to explore the contributions that Indian Americans have made to American culture and society. Ahamed chose to focus on three fields: tech, medicine, and public policy. Each section of the book features interviews and profiles of Indian American leaders, including Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla, author and neurosurgeon Atul Gawande, and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley. Most of the leaders Ahamed profiles are men; the exceptions are Haley, as well as sisters and businesswomen Chandrika Tandon and Indra Nooyi, who share a chapter. While several of the interviews present fascinating insights into the characters of these high-profile people\u2014for example, legal scholar Neal Katyal discusses how taking improv classes improved his performance arguing in front of the Supreme Court\u2014the book lacks overall coherence, jumping between leaders without drawing sufficient connections between their attitudes and histories. Ahamed\u2019s implicit definition of success seems to involve amassing degrees from elite institutions and becoming wealthy, an approach that not only reinscribes the model minority myth, but also is debunked by interviewees like Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When Ahamed arrived in suburban Boston in 1970, she felt \u201can acute sense of disappointment,\u201d she writes. \u201cWhat were these quaint, old-fashioned houses doing in the land that had sent men and rocket ships to the moon?\u201d The silence of her new home made her long for the noise and liveliness of her native India. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2005,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}