Greetings from Bury Park: Race. Religion. Rock 'n' Roll

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Once a month I would make the three-and-a-half-hour train journey back to Luton to see the family but only out of a sense of obligation. Implicit is the thought that Britain can be a beautiful place for all people of generous, tolerant, thoughtful disposition. Manzoor’s devotion to The Boss demonstrates the surprising force music can have on the formation of your identity, if the right music finds you at the right time.

Light: The True Story Behind the Movie Blinded by the Light: The True Story Behind the Movie

While Bruce is seminal to the story, his music is more of a vehicle through which the author tells his story. In the end, though, it's the explosions on the London tube that force Manzoor to attach guy ropes to his sense of place and self.Manzoor handles all this with deftness, appropriate dollops of sentimentality and occasional outbursts of situation comedy. So it’s very plausible that Bruce’s music could have such an impact on a British Pakistani teenager in the 80s. The book is about many things — the impact of multi-culturalism, a coming-of-age story and Nick Hornby-style documentation of musical obsession — [but] it is Manzoor’s relationship with his father, a factory worker who dies when he is 23, that lies at its heart.

Greetings from Bury Park by Sarfraz Manzoor | Waterstones

Springsteen quickly wrote " Blinded by the Light" and " Spirit in the Night", [8] and recorded both on September 11, 1972. His experience at the University of Manchester, despite initially being about “trying to get away from my parents and my home town”, was formative. Greetings from Bury Park takes time to address the economic issues that dominate the lives of immigrants, but it is the father's obliviousness to the complexity of his son's emotional life that gives this affectionate memoir its substance.While my friends were beginning careers in accountancy and medicine I was most successful at being fired from low-paid temporary jobs: I had been sacked from a data-inputting job for only typing with one hand and doodling with the other, and fired from a credit control agency for having stuck an obscene Public Enemy lyric scribbled on a Post-it to my computer screen. As a musical tribute, this offers an interesting insight into the psyche of an avid fan but it is as a childhood memoir — as painful in parts as it is endearing — that Manzoor’s book really comes to life. I was barely on speaking terms with my father and most of my conversations with my mother were about how I hardly talked to my father.

Sarfraz Manzoor says he will use new role to make Luton ‘cool’

In my teenage years it was the National Front who marched through my hometown; now it is Britain First and the English Defence League. Yet, one year after Greetings from Bury Park was published, Barack Obama, then a state senator from Illinois, became the Democratic party’s nominee for president. I don't think we should try to homogenise ourselves, but neither do I think we should simply tolerate one another.My mother claims she did not try to change her husband's mind because for a full year before he left he had kept reminding her that the only way their children were not going to be condemned to poverty was if she allowed him this one chance to carve out a better future elsewhere. The opening chunk of this book thinks it's an exploration of difficult times and a tense relationship; in actuality it's a glowing, almost embarrassed tribute to a loving father who sacrificed everything to try and give his family a life better than that he'd known.

Greetings From Bury Park by Sarfraz Manzoor - The Bookbag Greetings From Bury Park by Sarfraz Manzoor - The Bookbag

I think we should show an interest in other people's lives, generally carry on in our own sweet ways, and let time take care of blurring the boundaries. But it was when his best friend introduced him to the music of Bruce Springsteen that his life changed completely. It's not a problem, I'm making notes of what we're saying,' I lied, staring with rising panic at the blank sheet of paper on my lap.His father had worked in the country for over ten years and so for him, it was not only a new country, but a new family set up. Sarfraz spent his teenage years in a constant battle, trying to reconcile being both British and Muslim, trying to fit in at school and at home. When I was younger I didn't want to know who my father was because I believed my father had nothing to do with me.