In yesterday's NY Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu, who visits us on Thursday, March 13:Dinaw Mengestu’s deeply moving new novel, “All Our Names,” takes place in the early 1970s in two worlds that could not be farther apart: a quiet, semirural town named Laurel in the American Midwest, and Kampala, the capital of Uganda, where bright hopes of independence have given way to violence, corruption and brutal government crackdowns. The young African man who transits these two worlds is named Isaac — or at least that is the name on the passport he carries. He has arrived in Laurel with a one-year student visa and is introduced to a social worker named Helen, who is supposed to be “his chaperone into Middle America — his personal tour guide of our town’s shopping malls, grocery stores, banks and bureaucracies.”
More in the Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/books/dinaw-mengestus-all-our-names-describes-unexpected-love.html?hpw&rref=books&_r=0
More about Mengestu's upcoming visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/mengestu_dinaw14.html
