Slanted

Tam's compelling memoir, Slanted: How an Asian American Troublemaker Took on the Supreme Court, is about keeping true to his punk-rock heart and making history through an eight-year fight to get a trademark registration from the government for his all-Asian American band's name, the Slants. Nobody starts a band thinking that they're going to go to the Supreme Court, he writes. But his book tells the fascinating and important tale of exactly how that happened to him -- and what it means for others. - The Washington Post The odyssey preceding the Supreme Court's 2017 decision in Matal v. Tam is, certainly, the draw of Tam's memoir. And Tam, now widely known as a plaintiff, capably relates the substance of his case without becoming ensnared in it. Yet his account is most compelling when read from a different angle: not as legal nonfiction, but rather as a journey of being and realization. - The Oregonian Tam wanted to make the book approachable for music fans, law students and Asian Americans. Thus, the memoir covers his decision to leave college and a scholarship to join a band in Portland, Oregon ( My father frowned, the wrinkles in his forehead suddenly appearing, and his greying moustache folding over his lips ); the history of Supreme Court cases brought by Asian Americans (the most well-known dealt with Japanese American incarceration or citizenship); and the breakup of an engagement as the case wove its way through the courts ( ...we just maintained the illusion that we were still together until she bought her one-way ticket ), among other portions of Tam's life. He says, If you show up on a regular basis and you work hard at it, over time you'll start seeing positive changes being made. - NBC Slanted does what a good memoir should: it shows a person shaped by society--its laws, institutions, and mores--and how that person fought back to reshape society...It's sad just how many of America's social problems were organically part of Tam's story, but impressive just how well he does at knitting them together: the conceptual incoherence of race, the history of anti-Asian bigotry, the role and purpose separation plays in assimilation for immigrants, the psychological conflict minorities have between just getting along and correcting stupidities, the prohibitive costs of justice in our legal system, and the nastiness of ethnic stereotypes in media. All are in Slanted and all are handled with more care and common sense than you'll get from most professional political commentators. - The Humanist Slanted is not a book to read before bed. Despite being a memoir that rolls up its sleeves and digs into the finer points of intellectual property law, musician and activist Simon Tam's prose has a fist-pumping, rock 'n' roll romanticism that makes you wanna get up and kick things. - The Stranger/Portland Mercury