I Am Indian American

Children's Literature - Uma Krishnaswami

This book is part of the publisher's "Our American Family" series. The photographs are appealing. The page on Columbus's grand mistake is amusing. But there are too many errors and omissions here, some subtle and some glaring. Karim is a Muslim name, yet the child in the book is portrayed as a Hindu child. In the tallying of religions of India, Sikhism is conspicuous in its absence-yet the Sikh community sent some of the earliest migrants from the subcontinent to North America. Regional representation in text and photo is sometimes mismatched. If someone with in-depth knowledge of India was called upon as a consultant in the production of this book, it is not evident.