by Aaron Bobrow-Strain ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
This potent, important work, which “occupies a space between journalism and ethnography, with a dash of oral history and...
A professor combines his academic research with his decadeslong U.S.–Mexico border activism to brightly illuminate immigration realities by focusing on the struggles of one young woman.
In this powerful saga, Bobrow-Strain (Politics/Whitman Coll.; White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, 2012, etc.), a founding member of the Walla Walla Immigrant Rights Coalition in Washington state, focuses primarily on Agua Prieta, Mexico, just across the border from Douglas, Arizona. Until around 1990, the border between the two towns seemed mostly invisible. Douglas residents often shopped, dined, and worked in Agua Prieta, and vice versa. Aida Hernandez—not her actual name, an anonymity the author explains in detail—was born in Agua Prieta in 1987. Until age 9, she resided in Mexico, impoverished but generally content. When Aida’s mother left Mexico with her and her siblings to escape a violent marriage, vast complications began. The new man in the family’s life turned out to be worse than the biological father, but they were dependent on him for lodging and food and cowed by his threats to have them deported back to Mexico. Although Aida dedicated herself to performing well in school and learning fluent English, her undocumented status meant constant uncertainty. It also meant that she was vulnerable to violent male figures, ranging from her mother’s paramour to Aida’s boyfriends to abusive Border Patrol agents. When Aida had a son at age 16, her lack of adequate income and her overall vulnerability became far more complex since every decision she made would affect her child. Bobrow-Strain met Aida through a social worker whose own complicated border saga mingles with many others portrayed by the author in vivid and often agonizing detail. The settings eventually transcend Agua Prieta and Douglas to encompass immigration detention centers, overwhelmed immigration courts, and, eventually, New York City, where Aida and her son battle for a better life.
This potent, important work, which “occupies a space between journalism and ethnography, with a dash of oral history and biography,” adds much to the continuing immigration debate.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-19197-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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