Small acts of courage A legacy of endurance and the fight for democracy

Review by Booklist Review

Celebrated journalist Velshi is multiculturalism personified. His dramatic family history begins in India, shifts to South Africa, transfers to Kenya, settles in Canada, and ultimately includes American citizenship. Velshi shares tales of a great-grandfather who plunged into shark-infested waters to make it to another land where surely prosperity awaited. Other stories feature ambitious business owners whose life work is ripped away during threatening regime changes. Still other family members analyzed impending civil unrest and decided to sacrifice everything to pursue a more stable life. Velshi's relatable voice, so familiar to viewers of MSNBC, virtually leaps off the page as he relates the generational diaspora of his family. He is both calmly accepting and deservedly in awe of his ancestors' commitment and bravery. There is less than the famous six-degrees separating his relatives from iconic resistance leaders. As a child, his grandfather rode on Gandhi's shoulders during a lengthy protest march; an uncle fought apartheid alongside Mandela. With such legacies in their wheelhouse, Velshi's family constantly sought a promised land where they could be their freest and most authentic selves. With great humility and boundless appreciation, Velshi honors his family's valor and convictions and proudly accepts the mantle of social activism, bringing tales of immigrant struggles and myriad injustices to light.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Library Journal Review

In 2020, award-winning MSNBC broadcast journalist Velshi (The Trump Indictments) was shot with a rubber bullet by Minneapolis police while covering an antiracist protest. The event jarred him into pondering the duties of citizenship and the acts of courage and compassion incumbent on people to improve their communities, as he describes in this biography/memoir with distinctive insights into the nature of citizenship. Velshi's great-grandfather immigrated from India to South Africa by leaping from a ship into the shark-infested ocean and swimming to shore; his grandfather studied under Mahatma Gandhi on Tolstoy Farm, the spiritual heart of Gandhi's nonviolent civil rights campaign in South Africa; and his parents fled to Kenya to avoid South Africa's oppressive apartheid regime and later immigrated to Canada, where his father became Ontario's first elected legislator of Indian descent. In 2015, the author himself became a U.S. citizen. VERDICT This family saga educates, entertains, and fascinates as a study of the Indian and Ismaili Muslim diasporas and of immigrants' countless contributions to their new homelands.--Michael Rodriguez

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The MSNBC journalist reflects on his family's history of multinational activism. Velshi, author of The Trump Indictments, traces his family's roots back to Chotila, a village in Gujarat, India. The author's father told him the elders left the area because of a lack of opportunity, a trend Velshi suspects partly arose from the famines that swept the nation in the mid-1800s. Induced by the exploitation of the British Raj, these famines killed approximately 15 million people. Velshi's ancestors immigrated to South Africa based on stories about the prosperity it could offer. There, the author's elders enrolled his great-grandfather in Gandhi's famous school at Tolstoy Farm, an experience that kicked off several generations of creative resistance. In one example, Velshi chronicles the case of his anti-apartheid uncle, which included being charged with selling yeast to Black families, an activity that was against the law. Under government pressure, the Velshis fled South Africa for Kenya. Later, when anti-Indian sentiment rose in Kenya, they ended up in Canada, where the author's father would eventually successfully run for office, becoming one of the first immigrant Canadians to do so. During the swearing-in ceremony, he used a Quran, "another first in Ontario political history." Velshi's family history doubles as a personal history of the oppressive colonial systems that have forced Indian migration around the world. The author is charmingly aware of some of the narrative's shortcomings, doing his best to compensate for the lack of women represented in his family's story and admitting that some of the overly idealistic parts reflect his "glass-half-full" mentality. Despite these weaknesses, this work is essential reading for members of the South Asian diaspora who rarely see their history told in such a compassionate, cleareyed manner. A journalist's instructive family memoir provides a crash course in Indian diasporic history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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