Offering a refreshing alternative perspective on the West, comedian and political commentator Konstantin Kisin’s powerful, honest memoir reflects on his path as an Soviet immigrant to the UK and the opportunities he has found and embraced in his chosen home country.
For all of the West's failings - terrible food, cold weather, and questionable politicians with funny hair to name a few - it has its upsides. Konstantin would know. Growing up in the Soviet Union, he experienced first-hand the horrors of a socialist paradise gone wrong, having lived in extreme poverty with little access to even the most basic of necessities. It wasn't until he moved to the UK that Kisin found himself thriving in an open and tolerant society, receiving countless opportunities he would never have had otherwise.
Funny, provocative and unswervingly perceptive, An Immigrant's Love letter to the West interrogates the developing sense of self-loathing the Western sphere has adopted and offers an alternative perspective. Exploring race politics, free speech, immigration and more, Kisin argues that wrongdoing and guilt need not pervade how we feel about the West - and Britain - today, and that despite all its ups and downs, it remains one of the best places to live in the world.
After all, if an immigrant can't publicly profess their appreciation for this country, who can?
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
ISBN: 9781408716045
Number of pages: 224
Weight: 350 g
Dimensions: 218 x 138 x 24 mm
Kisin has written a lively and spirited book defending the society he is grateful to have found himself in. If I can return the compliment, we are lucky to have him. - Douglas Murray, Telegraph
Kisin's book [has] a powerful moral quality that ultimately makes it worth reading - Sunday Times
An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West is a paean to the freedom and dignity that many in the West take for granted. With solemnity and irreverence, Kisin, who grew up in the Soviet Union, explains that the loss off liberty is not imprisonment - it is horror. We are not born valuing self-determination, free speech and open inquiry. Each generation must relearn and fight for these values or we will revisit the horrors of the past upon ourselves. This book is a reminder of what's at stake. - Peter Boghossian
Kisin's cool, steady but urgent message, that we should value and protect what we have, could not be more timely amid today's shrill screams about the various 'isms' and 'phobias' of which our country is irredeemably guilty - spiked
[Kisin is] a comedian by trade, but a writer by nature . . . powerful . . . a deadly warning which somehow manages to be bright and breezy - Spectator
[An] excellent book . . . both a thank-you to the country [Kisin] now calls home and a reminder to many of his generation that they should be careful what they wish for. - Daily Mail
An engaging writer with a nice line in self-deprecating wit - Mail on Sunday
A fantastic and hysterical book that makes it perfectly clear why we should not take freedom and being born in the West for granted.
What a great book! Full of common sense but also contains masses of factual information (much of which many people are not aware of).Konstantin’s dry sense of humour is wonderful. It was like listening to his shared... More
This book perfectly highlights and dismantles the absurdities of our time whilst simultaneously demonstrating why what we have in the West is special and worth protecting.
Konstantin is both witty and...
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