Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Brown

Subtitle: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone)

Author: Kamal Al-Solaylee

Narrator: Fajer Al-Kaisi

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-22-17

Publisher: Audible Studios

Genres: Nonfiction, Social Sciences

Publisher's Summary:

Winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing

Finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the Trillium Book Award

A Globe and Mail, National Post, Toronto Life, Walrus, CBC Books, Chatelaine, Hill Times, 49th Shelf, and Writers' Trust Best Book of the Year

With the urgency and passion of Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me), the seductive storytelling of JD Vance (Hillbilly Elegy) and the historical rigor of Carol Anderson (White Rage), Kamal Al-Solaylee explores the in-between space that brown people occupy in today's world: on the cusp of whiteness and the edge of blackness. Brown proposes a cohesive racial identity and politics for the millions of people from the Global South and provides a timely context for the frictions and anxieties around immigration and multiculturalism that have led to the rise of populist movements in Europe and the election of Donald Trump.

At once personal and global, Brown is packed with storytelling and on-the-street reporting conducted over two years in 10 countries on four continents that reveals a multitude of lives and stories from destinations as far apart as the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, the United States, Britain, Trinidad, France, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Qatar, and Canada. It features striking research about the emergence of brown as the color of cheap labor and the pursuit of a lighter skin tone as a global status symbol. As he studies the significance of brown skin for people from North Africa and the Middle East, Mexico and Central America, and South and East Asia, Al-Solaylee also reflects on his own identity and experiences as a brown-skinned person (in his case from Yemen) who grew up with images of whiteness as the only indicators of beauty and success.

This is a daring and politically resonant work that challenges our assumptions about race, immigration, and globalism and recounts the heartbreaking stories of the people caught in the middle.

Members Reviews:

Global look at immigrant/migrant labor

So often discussions of race only include black and white, while the world has actually been filling up with brown people. Al-Solaylee looks at how brown immigrant workers survive in host countries all over the world, including Asia, the Americas and the South Pacific. He discusses the universality of colorism and the global economy that requires people to leave their home country just to earn enough to keep their family fed and housed. His theory is chilling that for uneducated brown people, your skin color determines your economic mobility.

The author uses many personal stories to keep the analysis grounded in real experience and not too theoretical. He spent months (years?) interviewing workers all over the world. Although the material can be grim, Al-Solaylee's writing style is warm and occasionally humorous, indicating that a real person did this fieldwork, not some dry scientist. I recommend this book for a look at how brown people survive in host countries all over the world, and to see how Mexicans in the U.S. fit into this dynamic (as a Mexican-American, that's my particular interest).

An eye opener book

I liked this well written book. I think that people who are interested in undestanding the world where we live in will like it too.