Turn Left

"Turn Left" centers on the perennial immigrant question: “Where do I belong?” Through personal anecdotes and shrewd cultural commentary, Iranian-American professor and innovator Illah Nourbakhsh illustrates how the immigrant experience defies categorization, no matter how often it is put in a box. In this wide-ranging memoir, Nourbakhsh traces the evolution of his sense of belonging through the Iranian Revolution, the Gulf Wars, 9/11, the AI revolution, the dot-com boom, NASA, and two American universities. Along the way, readers will join a race across the U.S. in an electric car, visit dozens of countries with National Geographic, and arrive at a model for community engagement and social robotics—all through the complex lens of the immigrant experience.