His book challenges the Master Narrative, the idea that our country was settled by European immigrants and that Americans are white, by telling the stories of multicultural Americans. A Different Mirror studies the past for the sake of the future” writes Ronald Takaki. “As the time approaches when all Americans will be minorities, we face a challenge: not just to understand the world, but to make it better. Mad respect for the author and his successes in life, and I definitely appreciate the fact that this exists, but I never want to read it ever again. Not only is it boring, it had so much of what seemed like filler material to me there was a fair amount of repetition, and the author constantly quoted people, though rather than quoting them in a citation-friendly manner, it was usually worded like, 'As an Irish peasant woman once said.' or 'As a Native American chief once wrote.' Maybe it's a weird pet peeve of mine, but it kept reminding me of when you're a student writing an essay and trying to meet your word minimum, so you throw in arbitrary quotes that offer no value to the work and simply repeat what you've already paraphrased. I found myself trudging through no more than a chapter at a time because it literally read like a school textbook, and if I wasn't assigned to read this for a class, I would have DNFed it within the first 100 pages. It's factual, it's informative, it's not poorly written, it's just dreadfully boring. I went into it expecting a standard nonfiction book, but what I received was a textbook on the history of North America, slightly watered down to be child-appropriate. I don't know if the problem is me, this book, or just my expectations.

Like Zinn's A People's History, Takaki's A Different Mirror offers a rich and rewarding 'people's view' perspective on the American story.Īssigned reading for MLIS 7421: Multicultural Youth Literature. ĭrawing on Takaki's vast array of primary sources, and staying true to his own words whenever possible, A Different Mirror for Young People brings ethnic history alive through the words of people, including teenagers, who recorded their experiences in letters, diaries, and poems. When the first edition of A Different Mirror was published in 1993, Publishers Weekly called it 'a brilliant revisionist history of America that is likely to become a classic of multicultural studies' and named it one of the ten best books of the year. Now Rebecca Stefoff, who adapted Howard Zinn's best-selling A People's History of the United States for younger readers, turns the updated 2008 edition of Takaki's multicultural masterwork into A Different Mirror for Young People.

A longtime professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, Ronald Takaki was recognized as one of the foremost scholars of American ethnic history and diversity.

A different mirror book