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In “Son of Elders”, Elamin Abdelmahmoud writes about growing up in Canada after moving there from Sudan when he was 12. In this week’s podcast, he talks about that experience, including his first interactions with his new peers.
“This is not a story of bigotry, this is not a story of a classic playground bully,” Abdelmahmoud says. “Most of the demons I wrestled with in this book actually reverted to the feelings of… me to put certain parts of my identity on the shelf. Because sometimes you don’t really have to wait for other people to cut you down, you can do that to yourself. So I came to Canada and as I tried to adapt, one of the things that became clear to me pretty quickly was: I don’t want to stand out. I don’t want to be the attention of the new kid, the immigrant kid. I don’t want to be different.”
Investigative journalist and author Sally Denton visits the podcast to discuss her new book, “The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land”, that takes readers across the border to a Mormon cult in Mexico. Denton says the idea for the book came to her in 2019 after she saw the news that gunmen opened fire on a caravan of three cars from a Mormon community, killing three women and six children.
“When I heard about this incident, I immediately noticed there was more to this story,” Denton says. “This was not a case of misidentification, it was not a case of people being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This was a group of women and children who were deliberately targeted in the most brutal and gruesome way. And I was initially very moved by the tragedy and thought it would be very important to find out what was going on. And my main motivation was actually: why were these women and children traveling alone on one of the most dangerous roads in the world? Where were the men? Why were they unarmed, why were they unaccompanied?”
Also in this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter talks about the growing number of independent bookstores and their increased diversity; and Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai talk about books they’ve recently reviewed.
Here are the books discussed in this week’s “What We Read”:
We’d love to hear what you think about this episode, and about the Book Review podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].