Word: whiteness
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Thirty years after the war in which they fought together, Archie is reunited with his best friend, the Bengali Muslim Samad Iqbal. “White Teeth” follows the Iqbal and Jones families before and after the reunion. Samad and his feisty wife Alsana raise their twins, Magid and Millat, while Archie and Clara raise their daughter Irie. The children attempt to eke out their place in English society, not really belonging to the culture of their parents or the place where they were born: “Millat was neither one thing nor the other, this...
Samad and Archie’s stories, as well as the stories from their long-suffering young wives’ points of view, make up the first and best half of the book. But “White Teeth” changes once Smith takes up the mantle of the new generation, the products of cross-cultural fertilization. Smith provides a snapshot of Archie’s daughter Irie writing feverishly in her diary. Her depiction of overwrought adolescence is pitch-perfect: “8:30 P.M. Millat just walked in. He’s sooo gorgeous but ultimately...
...duke it out, Smith purposefully offers a chance for redemption and closure unavailable in real life. This conclusion is an unsatisfying end, but the point of the book is not the plot. Her rich, realistic portrayal of the characters and their view of London make “White Teeth” a book worth reading...
...White Teeth” is funny. It is a charming and thought-provoking look into British society, the immigrant experience not seen by the outside world. It reveals the society’s flaws, poking fun at everybody but condemning nobody. Zadie Smith shows the confusion of trying to understand the present in the context of a past that never existed; “The funny thing about getting old in a country is people always want to hear that from you,” Archie muses. “They want to hear it really was once a green...
Speaking as part of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center’s Theodore H. White Lecture, Branch used the media’s role in the scandals of the Clinton administration to demonstrate the need for journalistic reform. He said that he sees the Monica Lewinsky scandal as a symptom of the breakdown of the process...