Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global

by Nina Sichel, Faith Eidse, Anora Egan

The experience of growing up without the opportunity to ever "put down roots"
A fusion of voices and deeply personal experiences from every corner of the globe, Unrooted Childhoods presents a cultural mosaic of today's citizens of the world. In twenty stirring memoirs of childhoods spent packing, writings by both world-famous and first-time authors (many published here for the first time) make universal the story of growing up without...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1857883381
• ISBN13: 9781857883381
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
• Length: 332 Pages
• Weight: 1.17 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A revealing anthology of personal memoirs

Expertly co-edited by Faith Eidse and Nina Sichel, Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs Of Growing Up Global is a revealing anthology of personal memoirs drawn from a wide variety of authors, each of whom focus upon the experience of growing up without being able to "put down roots" of belonging. Many of these thoughtful and thought-provoking essays are published here for the first time. They reflect the link between language and cultural identity, as well as the framing the travails of adolescence in North America, South America, and Africa, offering the reader a impressive collection of uniquely human voices identifying the dehumanizing cultural homogenization that globalization tends to unilaterally spread. Unrooted Childhoods is a seminal and highly recommended contribution to contemporary sociology, cultural history, social issues, and autobiography reading lists.

Eye-opening accounts of global childhoods

This book can be read on many levels. On a basic level, it can be read merely as a collection of entertaining stories of the childhoods of various people. On deeper level, it can be seen as a fascinating study into how the cultures in which we grow up shape our adult lives; and how children with no particular affiliation towards any country forge their own identities. In this age where travel has never been easier and people are increasingly mobile, this book poses the question - what does nationality actually mean, and what happens when that is taken away? An important book for our time.

Unrooted - Real, Rich, Rewarding - Read It

The Publisher's Weekly paragraph reads more like a tenth grader's bored attempt to complete an assignment than an adult's intelligent reading of this rich collection of essays on the experience of growing up as an extra-cultural (variant of extraterrestrial). In this one collection you will find not only the best of the internationally known literati who write about this experience (Pico Ayer, Isabelle Allende, Carlos Fuente...) but also the fresh and vibrant writings of lesser known yet equally powerful writers (Faith Eidse, Sara Taber, Camilla Trinchieri ...) To conclude saying the essays focus on misery is like concluding that trees take space; it is almost irrelevant. These essays are first hand accounts of the powerful experience of an international education, of opening one's mind to otherness, of finding a center in the whirlwind of mobility and the extremes of cultures that co-exist on earth. In these writings, you feel what it was like to be there - you taste, and smell and see and hear, as if you were there. No matter your own experience - whether you lived in the same neighborhood for 21 years, or moved every six months for the first six - the experiences shared will shine a light no less stunning than the vistas from mountaintops or streams of sunlight through clouds. The vitality of the prose is the written equivalent of music videos. You will want to mark your copy up, share it with friends and then write your own experience. This text will become a standard in high school and college classes on a fresh dimension of multiculturalism. The life giving force of these personal essays is the material from which evolutions in transnational culture are emerging. Kudos to those who brought it to fruition.