Of Beetles and Angels - Hardcover

Mawi Asgedom graduated from Harvard University in 1999 with many top honors. His classmates elected him to be one of eight class marshals and he delivered the commencement speech to more than 30,000 people at his graduation.

He currently works full-time as a professional speaker. His clients range from middle schools and high schools, to universities and Fortune 500 companies. He lives in Chicago. He is twenty-four years old.

In 1983, at age seven, Asgedom and his family arrived in this country under the sponsorship of World Relief, a U.S.-based Christian organization that helps refugees from all over the world resettle here. Having fled the Eritrean and Ethiopian conflict, Asgedom and his parents and three siblings had spent the previous three years in a refugee camp in Sudan, then in the throes of a civil war. This earnest account of his life up to his graduation from Harvard is peppered with powerful moments. The opening description of his family's flight recalls the media images of Ethiopia in the 1980s: skeletal children trailing across a war-torn, drought-ridden land. Those images aroused great sympathy in American viewers, who nonetheless remained comfortably remote. That one of those children would land in an American suburb, grow up on welfare, earn an Ivy League degree and publish a memoir at first elicits a kind of cognitive dissonance. But Asgedom soon familiarizes us with his family's experience. Much of the book consists of anecdotal recollections of schoolyard pranks and fights that illustrate an immigrant family's experience in a Chicago suburb, although the telling can be rote and gives short shrift to key periods of Asgedom's life. We learn almost nothing, for instance, about his Harvard years, and little about his life before coming to the States. In the end, the book seems only a sketch of a life full of drama and courage. (Mar.)Forecast: Asgedom now works full-time as an inspirational speaker at venues ranging from schools and churches to Fortune 500 companies, which should provide him with a small but devoted readership.

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