Dr. Jaswant Singh Sachdev, once again, echoes the themes of duality and immigrant-assimilation in his second book, "One Coin, Two Sides." The title is a slight variation of the phrase, "Two sides of the same coin," which refers to closely related features of one idea.

As Dr. Sachdev suggests throughout the book, the process of assimilation ideally involves maintaining the best of one's own culture while adopting select customs of the new country, one's adopted homeland. An immigrant's experience is, thus, like a coin. The beliefs and traditions that the immigrant grew up with in the motherland are minted on the obverse side, while the attitudes and customs that the immigrant adopts in the new homeland are gradually stamped on the reverse side.

How to navigate two cultures, that sometimes conflict, is at the crux of "One Coin, Two Sides." Dr. Sachdev examines lifestyle matters, health concerns, religious practices, and historical events among other topics, to provide readers with not only answers to questions but, on the other side of the coin, with questions to long-held presumptions.

Dr. Sachdev writes about immigrant issues based on his conversations with friends and readers of his articles that have been appearing in local and national ethnic weeklies, as well as from his own life. As a child, Dr. Sachdev and his Sikh family were displaced to East Punjab in India by the partition of 1947. Later, after studying at New York Medical College, he moved to Phoenix, Arizona, to practice medicine and raise his family. The immigrant experience is one that Dr. Sachdev has lived first-hand.

The book he has produced is like a rare coin that shines with priceless insight and uncommon intelligence, and is a valuable addition to Indian subcontinent diaspora literature as well as for those born and raised in the West.