"The acclaimed, award-winning novelist--author of The Moor's Account and The Other Americans--now gives us a bracingly personal work of nonfiction that is concerned with the experiences of "conditional citizens." What does it mean to be American? In this starkly illuminating and impassioned book, Pulitzer Prize Finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using it as a starting point for her exploration...

"We raise our children in a fragile world. Climate change, pandemics, superbugs resistant to antibiotics. Extreme inequality, endemic poverty, institutionalized racism and sexism. What does it mean to be a "good parent" in the face of all this? This book is one woman's quest for an answer, as a philosopher and as a mother"--