Struggle and Progress

"Struggle and Progress" is a culmination of an oblivious yet fiery competitive spirit, catharsis - driven introspection, communal and divine buffering from disaster and accomplishment seemingly against significant odds. Partially set in Trinidad and Tobago, this book is, in part, Inspired by an assembly of our family tree (by Natalie Felix) spanning six generations and dating back to the mid - 1800s with Marie and Jean Fuller, my great-great-grandparents whom I never had the privilege of meeting. And a reflection on my mother's (Joan Elizabeth Fuller's) life from infancy to adulthood - a story decorated with survival and perseverance paving the way for multiple Fuller family success stories.The genesis of this reflection was one summer day in my Westchester, New York condo a couple of years after graduating from Columbia University and having commenced employment as a Research Scientist at IBM Research in New York. My mother was visiting and we were having a casual conversation that took her back four decades to her youth highlighting how she and her siblings were entrusted into adulthood as early adolescents. While I always knew I was battling against history in some sense, it was never more lucid to me than during this conversation of the relative unprecedented nature of my life's success and what that meant in no small part to my mother and many others. It was at this moment that I made the commitment to document and tell my story, our story.