Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Manzoor had admired the United States, wishing to live there, but after the experience of witnessing the 9/11 attacks in 2001 he came to view Britain as being his true home. When Javed and Roops respond to bigotry by singing Springsteen lyrics, things veer a little too far into Mamma Mia! Steven Van Zandt reportedly provided sound effects on " Lost in the Flood", [24] [25] although Van Zandt denied having any involvement on his official Twitter page. A tender, funny, book, which captures the weirdness of second-generation British lives as well as anything I've read.
Greetings from Bury Park by Sarfraz Manzoor | Waterstones
Manzoor] poignantly shows how he comes to admire the life his father led even though it wasn't what he chose. Blinded by the Light ends by showing a photo of Manzoor with Springsteen, as well as a photo of the real Roops (Javed's Sikh friend, who introduces him to Springsteen's music), and a photo of Manzoor's real parents. Billy Bragg also attempts to define his own national identity in The Progressive Patriot, while Nigel Slater's Toast talks about the death of a parent and a difficult paternal relationship.Greetings ends with the most stark, if gently expressed, denunciation of the homicide bombers yet uttered by a British Asian, and a realisation that it is Britain (not his father's Pakistan, or Springsteen's mythical America) that is his 'land of hopes and dreams'. But also, it never fails to illustrate that good music is a powerful force in transcending cultures, heritages and backgrounds. You don’t need to be a fan of America’s blue-collar poet — or a British Asian for that matter — to enjoy this deeply touching memoir. 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. So it’s very plausible that Bruce’s music could have such an impact on a British Pakistani teenager in the 80s.
Greetings from Bury Park by Sarfraz Manzoor - Audiobook
Though it seems strange, we find ourselves understanding how he could have come to feel that "Bruce Springsteen gave me more persuasive answers than Islam". Manzoor's introduction to Springsteen's music, courtesy of his Sikh friend Amolak, is the most endearing part of this book. Greetings from Bury Park successfully evokes not only a particular time and place, but, more importantly, a pervasive sense of marginality. Even the horrors of the Twin Towers and 7/7 bring some positives, helping him resolve previous conflicts about race and religion. He's written tons of articles on music and movies and has appeared in Cinema Retro and American Heritage multiple times.
and Gary Imlach's award-winning My Father and Other Working-Class Football Heroes, it's about trying to make sense of the rubble left behind by a father's death. I don't think we should try to homogenise ourselves, but neither do I think we should simply tolerate one another. When my mother was fourteen her father passed away, a year later her brother's wife and her twenty-two-year-old sister died within months of each other. When my mother would protest that she was too old to be wearing such extravagant jewellery, my father replied that he was trying to compensate for the shame of having to accept borrowed gold on their wedding day. Ross Warner has been steeped in pop culture since he appeared on MTV's "Remote Control: Out Of The Basement Tour" in 1989.
Greetings from Bury Park : Manzoor, Sarfraz, 1971- : Free Greetings from Bury Park : Manzoor, Sarfraz, 1971- : Free
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. The result is a richly humane, often smile-inducing memoir, yet one whose themes remain strangely reluctant to gel. After the 9/11 attacks there had been a spate of books – notably The Islamist by Ed Husain – that sought to understand Islamic radicalisation through personal stories. Photograph: Danny Loo Sarfraz Manzoor says he wants to challenge the image of Luton and associate it with ideas and culture. In Christgau's Record Guide (1981), he wrote that despite the grandiloquent, unaccompanied "Mary Queen of Arkansas" and "The Angel", songs such as "Blinded by the Light" and "Growin' Up" foreshadow Springsteen's "unguarded teen-underclass poetry", while even the maundering "Lost in the Flood" is interesting.Also worth mentioning is comedian/talk show host Rob Brydon as the dad of Javed’s other friend Matt’s dad.
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. - Wikipedia Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. - Wikipedia
Springsteen, who literally wrote the solo in his head before the recording of Born To Run, told them that “Clarence would like that. the clash of civilizations suddenly begins to sound remote, and we're in the midst of a mass sing-along in which white and balck and "other" hardly make any sense at all. Both a tribute to Springsteen and a story of personal discovery, Greetings from Bury Park is a warm, irreverent, and exceptionally perceptive memoir about how music transcends religion and race. In comparison with some of his white peers, he had few toys, no fashionable clothes and an authoritarian father. Younger readers would greet them with horrified fascination and a renewed gratitude for how much things had changed.
That this film is being made now, that it will reach audiences who haven’t read the book, gives me a reason to feel hopeful.
Great Deal 
New Comment