Book Review

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (fiction) by Junot Diaz: recommended!
Diaz is a Dominican born Dominican-American author who won the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for this book. It's always hard to summarize good books, but pretty much the book is written from the perspective of a very insightful adolescent boy who well talks like a Hispanic version of Will from the Prince of Bel Air. Knowledge of Spanish is helpful because use of Spanish slang is common and sometimes entire phrases are written in Spanish.

What's so Great about America (non-fiction) by Dinesh D'Souza: recommended!
I first came upon this author in high school European History class. For homework, our teacher assigned us a chapter out of this book in conjunction with a chapter from Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel". Both authors tries to explain why the Western civilization currently dominates the world. Whereas Diamond emphasizes the environmental factors that have allowed the Western civilization to thrive (thus refuting the argument that the Western culture has dominated because it is superior), D'Souza argues that civilizations and cultures are not created equal, and that the Western civilization has prospered because it is superior to other cultures.

This controversial contention alone could be fodder enough for an entire book, however, D'Souza's arguments are numerous and far beyond just a refutation of the cultural relativism argument. For one, I like the book because D'Souza is an Indian-born Indian-American and he does an excellent job of considering all criticisms against America (in his first chapter Why They Hate Us) and refuting them one by one (the Left, the multiculturalists, the Islamic Fundamentalists, and the Third Word intellectuals are all among his targeted audience). D'Souza isn't an author that I agreed with consistently (him being a conservative Christian fundamentalist and me being a liberal agnostic, our views are bound to differ at some point), but it is fun to appreciate his point of view and consider his arguments. His scope of understanding and knowledge is very expansive and despite the points that I disagreed with him on, I concede that he is one very smart guy.

For one, I agreed with him on things about race and immigration. As an immigrant to the US, I couldn't help but nod my head in agreement with some of the differences in cultural attitudes that he has perceived between the US and the developing world/traditional societies. His argument against affirmative action was also very compelling and caught my attention. He uses quotes from civil rights leaders such as M.L.K. Jr, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington to frame his argument. He argues that what King was fighting for in the 1960s, was the chance for everyone to be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. In contrast, affirmative action is precisely an institutionalized method of judging one's merit by the color of their skin.

The existence of affirmative action reminds me of the children story "The Emperor's New Clothes" in which everyone bends over backwards to tell the Emperor that his new robe is breathtaking when in fact it is non-existent and the Emperor is nude. D'Souza is the boy who is honest and speaks out despite the risk of embarrassing everyone else. He's really doing society a favor by speaking out about this problem. Affirmative action is not only reverse racism against people who are not in the benefiting ethnic groups (as an Asian American, I can straight up say that I felt the unfair nature of affirmative action during the process of applying for colleges), but it also hurts the ethnic groups who supposedly "benefit" from it. This really stuck out to me when watching the mandatory Freshmen Counselor training videos and the Deans of multiple cultural houses addressed how Freshmen from "benefiting" ethnic groups readily doubt the validity of their own previous success and are likely to attribute their bad grades at Yale to them "not belonging" (aka being admitted because of Affirmative Action).

D'Souza's idea is that affirmative action should be eliminated, but I would say that the idea of helping students who are disadvantaged is a good one, but it should not be based on race, but rather socioeconomic class. To say that someone is disadvantaged simply because of their race is racist, but to say that a poor kid who grew up in a bad environment should be given some extra consideration is fair.