The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas
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3.8 • 18 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the NYPL Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism
Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, NPR, and Publishers Weekly
"Haunting.…[A]mong the most riveting nonfiction I have read in a long time.…The True American gives you new eyes on your nation, makes you wonder about both the recent South Asian immigrant behind the counter at the food mart and the tattooed white man behind you in line." —Eboo Patel, Washington Post
The True American tells the story of Raisuddin Bhuiyan, a Bangladesh Air Force officer who dreams of immigrating to America and working in technology. But days after 9/11, an avowed "American terrorist" named Mark Stroman, seeking revenge, walks into the Dallas minimart where Bhuiyan has found temporary work and shoots him, maiming and nearly killing him. Two more victims, at other gas stations, die instantly.
The True American traces the making of these two men, Stroman and Bhuiyan, and of their fateful encounter. It follows them as they rebuild shattered lives—one striving on death row to become a better man, the other to heal and pull himself up from the lowest rung on the ladder of an unfamiliar country. Ten years after the shooting, an Islamic pilgrimage seeds in Bhuiyan a strange idea: if he is ever to be whole, he must reenter Stroman’s life. He longs to confront Stroman and speak to him face to face about the attack that changed their lives. Bhuiyan publicly forgives Stroman, in the name of his religion and its notion of mercy. Then he wages a legal and public-relations campaign, against the state of Texas and Governor Rick Perry, to have his attacker spared from the death penalty.
Ranging from Texas’s juvenile justice system to the swirling crowd of pilgrims at the Hajj in Mecca; from a biker bar to an immigrant mosque in Dallas; from young military cadets in Bangladesh to elite paratroopers in Israel; from a wealthy household of chicken importers in Karachi, Pakistan, to the sober residences of Brownwood, Texas, The True American is a rich, profoundly moving exploration of the American dream in its many dimensions. It helps us to consider our love-hate relationship with immigrants, the underpinnings of domestic terrorism, and how—or whether—we choose what we become.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Competing visions of the American Dream clash in this rich account of a hate crime and its unlikely reverberations. New York Times columnist Giridharadas (India Calling) follows the encounter between Mark Stroman, a racist ex-con in Dallas who went on a killing spree targeting men he wrongly thought were Arabs after 9/11, and Raisuddin Bhuiyan, a Bangladeshi-born convenience-store clerk who was shot by Stroman but survived; Raisuddin later campaigned to spare Stroman the death penalty. Raisuddin's initiative, inspired by his pilgrimage to Mecca, makes for an affecting story of forgiveness and redemption, but the book's heart is the author's penetrating portraits of the two men: Stroman's violent, bigoted patriotism is a tribal affiliation that consoles the pain of his chaotic upbringing and sense of dispossessed white masculinity, yet it's Bhuiyan, the immigrant striving to reinvent himself, who emerges as the more iconic "true American." Giridharadas's evocative reportage captures the starkly contrasting, but complementary struggles of these men with sympathy and insight, setting them in a Texas landscape of strip malls and gas stations that is at once a moonscape of social anomie and a welcoming blank slate for a newcomer seeking to assimilate. The result is a classic story of arrival with a fresh and absorbing twist.
