Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Oct 2021
400 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
A journalist's powerful and incisive account of the forces steering the fate of his sprawling Filipino American family reframes how we comprehend the immigrant experience.
Nearing the age at which his mother had migrated to the US, part of the wave of non-Europeans who arrived after immigration quotas were relaxed in 1965, Albert Samaha began to question the ironclad belief in a better future that had inspired her family to uproot themselves from their birthplace. As she, her brother Spanky--a rising pop star back in Manila, now working as a luggage handler at San Francisco airport--and others of their generation struggled with setbacks amid mounting instability that seemed to keep prosperity ever out of reach, he wondered whether their decision to abandon a middle-class existence in the Philippines had been worth the cost.
Tracing his family's history through the region's unique geopolitical roots in Spanish colonialism, American intervention, and Japanese occupation, Samaha fits their arc into the wider story of global migration as determined by chess moves among superpowers. Ambitious, intimate, and incisive, Concepcion explores what it might mean to reckon with the unjust legacy of imperialism, to live with contradiction and hope, to fight for the unrealized ideals of an inherited homeland.
"[E]xtraordinary... Samaha...reckons with a legacy that's both benefited and burdened him and other first-generation immigrants, who've been tasked to navigate structures of 'American injustice' while ensuring their parents' 'sacrifice isn't wasted.' The result renders an extraordinary look at the freedoms and perils of making a new life in America." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Samaha, a reporter and inequality editor at BuzzFeed News, offers an expansive view of Filipino history and the experiences of Filipinx immigrants, who, with their American-born descendants, comprise the fourth-largest diaspora in the U.S...An edifying, well-written narrative that provides an intimate perspective on the legacy of colonialism." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A captivating, thoughtful, classification-defying read...[An] insightful, fresh perspective [on] immigration, history, and what it means to be American, all so fascinating and engagingly shared." – Booklist
"Samaha's memoir of his family's experience is a clear, moving, and powerful rumination on what it means to be an immigrant. Recommended for biography readers or for those wanting to read about the experiences of one immigrant family." - Library Journal
"Surprising and complex…Samaha plants [his relatives'] stories alongside his own and grows a remarkable family tree." - BookPage
"A wonder of a book, Concepcion should be required reading for anyone who thinks they know anything about America's past, or wants to understand its present and future." – Elaine Castillo, author of America Is Not the Heart
"Absolutely extraordinary—a sweeping story of global power and movement, told through the intimate reality of one Filipino family's centuries-long quest for self-determination within the grip of empire. A landmark in the contemporary literature of the diaspora. My admiration for it knows no bounds." - Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror
"An odyssey of history and memory across decades and countries, Concepcion excavates and astounds. Illuminating and epic, a revelation." - Bryan Washington, author of Lot and Memorial
This information about Concepcion was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Albert Samaha is an investigative journalist and inequality editor at BuzzFeed News whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Village Voice, San Francisco Weekly, and the Riverfront Times, among other outlets. A Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, he is also the author of Never Ran, Never Will: Boyhood and Football in a Changing American Inner City, which was a finalist for the 2019 PEN/ESPN Literary Sports Writing Award and winner of the New York Society Library's 2019 Hornblower Award. He lives in Brooklyn.
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