Greenhorn: Episodes in an Immigrant's Life

In this luminous memoir a life shaped by motion, memory, cultures and careers unfolds in the art of making a home in the unfamiliar. At the age of nine, Alex Krieger arrived in America with his three parents, survivors of the Holocaust. In Chicago, he entered his fourth classroom to learn his fourth language in four years. From that displaced childhood the journeying continues, as teacher, architect, and planner of cities.

With a poet's sensitivity and a craftsman's precision, Krieger reflects on that greenhorn's instinct to embrace the values of an adopted nation while remaining eyewitness to its contradictions. In prose at once sensitive and exacting, he captures the immigrant's enduring double vision: a heartfelt embrace of an adopted country coupled with eyewitness clarity to its contradictions. The result is a luminous meditation on belonging that honors both allegiance and origin.

Greenhorn has been praised across the design, academic, and literary worlds. Pam Y. Eddinger, Ph.D., President of Bunker Hill Community College, calls it "a luminous meditation on belonging." Sarah M. Whiting, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, recommends it to anyone seeking inspiration from stories of how family, higher education, architecture, and urbanism have shaped the nation's civic fabric. Mark Lamster of the Dallas Morning News notes the "knowledge, intelligence, humor, and generosity that has made him a Harvard institution beloved by generations of students." Dingliang Yang, Professor at the University of Minnesota, describes it as "a masterwork of memory and place."