A Place for Us - Fatima Farheen Mirza

Rarely do I come across a book that alters my thinking and opens my eyes to a new world.  This is a story of immigrant parents coming to terms with the adults their children have become.  On one hand it is the familiar tale of how first generation children clash with the expectations of their immigrant parents.  But those tales have been told using experiences and family relations familiar to someone from American culture.  In this story, I was immersed in the life of a Muslim family.  The author teaches us the day to day lives of this family: what they eat, how they greet one another, what they wear, what they believe.  Not by telling us but by showing the intimate details of their daily lives as they have their children, take them to school, teach them about their faith and, like all parents everywhere, adjust to the adults they become.  I came away feeling like I had lived in their world and had my eyes opened and my preconceived ideas eliminated.

In addition to the story, the writing is lyrical.  It's the first time I've enjoyed a story where the author goes back and forth between characters.  The story is told from each person's viewpoint but in a subtle way that moves the story forward while still going back and forth in time, sharing different perspectives of each character.  More importantly, we see a family, loving one another, clashing with each other and coming together.   Definitely in my top five for 2024.

Published: 2018  Read: October 2024  Genre: Fiction

The World I See - Dr. Fei-Fei Li

 Sub-title: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

This was a wonderful read that sheds a bright light on the early innovations in AI and one of its fascinating developers.  Dr Li weaves the story of her immigration and experiences in the US with the evolution of the technology.  She beautifully illustrates the power of family, mentors, and self-determination on realizing the intellect of a brilliant woman.  Highly recommended.

Quotes/Notes:

[on her mentor helping her and learning about her culture]..he read Chinese classics like Dream of the Red Chamber, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Journey to the West.

"But the failures are not in vain.  Mistakes trigger corrective signals, rippling across the network's tens of millions of constituent parts, each assessed for its contribution to the results and pushed, proportionately, to behave differently next time.  It's the simplest form of learning--to do less of whatever failed, and more of whatever didn't."

[on psychologist Eleanor Rosch and categorization and creating a vocabulary for understanding hierarchy - made me think of looking at DNA this way] "..superordinates and subordinate categories ..when taken as a whole, such hierarchies look like trees.  Moving toward the root means less specificity and differentiation, while moving toward the leaves, the farthest ends of each branch means more. "

[Anatol Holt] "AI was a technology that can make the perfect chess move while the room is on fire".

[on Jeremy Wolfe, cognitive scientist - made me think of doing a study on how blind and deaf perceive the world] "...concept of 'gist' ...directly confronted the question of what, exactly, humans perceive when they glance at the real world"  

"adversarial attacks" -  feeding information to directly confuse the AI

"explainability" or "explainable AI" - reducing neural networks' almost magical deliberations into a form humans can understand.

Published: 2023 Read: January 2024 Genre: Science

Digging to America - Ann Tyler

Two families adopt Korean baby girls and become friends after meeting at the airport as the children are delivered.  One family is American as apple pie; the other headed by an Iranian immigrant whose only American-born son and daughter-in-law embrace modern American ways.  The story is primarily about Maryam, grandmother to Suzanne, one of the girls.  The author uses a recurring celebration of the girls arrival anniversary to display the different feelings of her characters as they meld into the society.

I remember reading other books by Tyler and disliking her too tidy wrap up of story in a predictable ending--this one is no different.  When I was ready to yell at Maryam near the end, the author reverses course and puts a bow on the story. 

Since it was written in 2006 it is a perspective on immigration that is worth reading.

Published: 2006  Read: July 2018  Genre: Fiction