Reviews - America Is in the Heart

160 reviews for:

America Is in the Heart

Carlos Bulosan

3.75 AVERAGE

bookbelle5_17's review against another edition

dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

Review of America is in the Heart

By: Carlos Bulosan

Like other Asian immigrants, Filipinos were met with nothing but prejudice and hate when they came to America for a better life. Carlos Bulosan was born a peasant and had already experienced classism while in the Philippines. He couldn’t even go to school and had to self-educate with help from one of his brothers, who gave him books to learn to read. His family couldn’t even stay together, and his father never had enough money to keep their farm. When he was finally able to go to America, he kept having to travel from place to place and job to job, because the white people in America thought he and his people were sex crazed, gamblers, and trying to take their women. All the hate Bulosan experienced created a feeling of hate with in him and motivated him to become a Communist, believing it to be the only way that would lead to a society where he would be treated as an equal. Like a lot of books that deal with prejudice and immigrant experience, there were parts that were hard to read and resulted in feelings of anger and not understanding how someone could be treated this way. The abuse Bulosan and his friends experience is horrifying, but it doesn’t break him and he becomes a poet, expressing himself through words.

dianaeberhardt's review

4.0

Sad tale of a Filipino family’s struggles with poverty, illness, and racism

michaelgardner's review against another edition

4.0

Carlos Bulosan beautifully and honestly renders his experience as a child and all he must accept, discover, and learn in navigating the world he was born into, and the new world he was moved to make his new home. All of these are taught, the inscription into the child, but that doesn't make them true or a reflection of the soul residing within. This is a beautiful and painful work, honestly sharing the experience of the immigrant and the made-vulnerable, by a society which creates it.