You know, I usually avoid all those books in the style of "how I came to the States with two dollars in my pocket and became a millionaire." The shelves are packed with them, and mostly they are typical guides promising an easy path to success. But something in the title, "The American Dream", caught my attention. I thought, well, okay, I'll give it a chance. Maybe this time there’s something new?

The first couple of chapters really resembled such a guide. You read about a Galician who arrives in the States on a tourist visa. He starts working as a landscaper, then as a night janitor, learns the language from scratch, takes his first steps in business. Well, I thought, now it’s going to be a classic "from zero to a million" story that I’ve heard a hundred times in podcasts or seen on YouTube. It felt like one of those texts that should energize you with "you can do it too, if you want."

And then, somewhere in the middle of the book, everything breaks. And it breaks in such a way that I put the book down for a few minutes. I sat there, digesting what I had just read. The author, Petro Sandulyak, rather dryly, without any extra emotions, throws in: "First, they arrested me, my wife, then my son." For me, it was like an icy shower. "Blessed America," which seemed to have given the hero everything, took it away just as easily in an instant. And the most important thing is — not because of his failure or some bad decision. It happened because of a system that one ordinary businessman could do nothing about. Very different from what I’m used to seeing in Hollywood movies.

What struck me the most was how straightforward and unembellished the author describes the moment of downfall. No "but I didn't give up and kept going towards my goal," no staged struggle for the sake of the plot. Just an honest, I would say painfully honest, description of how it feels when the system decides that you are no longer "normal." And thank God, it’s not a management textbook. I might have wanted a bit more detail about the business itself — how exactly it scaled, what decisions the hero made. But apparently, this is not that kind of book. The author consciously keeps the focus on the human aspect, not on the business mechanics. And perhaps that’s where the essence lies. Another thing that stuck in my mind: the book is written by a Ukrainian about Ukrainians in the USA. Without an attempt to make it a "universal" success story that would suit anyone. Somewhere between the lines, you can constantly feel the Galician character — a bit stubborn, a bit taciturn, used to taking hits without extra words. It feels like a sincere story, told by one’s own, about one’s own.

Overall, it reads harder than I expected. Precisely because of this sincerity. It doesn’t charge you with positivity of "you can do it too," but makes you think about how much any dream truly costs. And whether you are ready to pay that price when the bill suddenly comes without warning. This was not the motivational literature I was expecting. Petro Sandulyak's book "The American Dream" made me reflect on many things. Have you ever had books that started as one thing but ended up being completely different?