A welcome, necessary rejoinder to critics of border policy on this side of the line.
A gathering of critical responses to the border crisis by Mexican poets, scholars, and activists.
Donald Trump is unquestionably the dark lord of this piece. Writes novelist Boullosa, “his peculiar blend of racism and xenophobia, opportunism and cynicism, foolishness and cunning, cruelty and hypocrisy demands attention.” Yet Trump is not alone. As several of the contributors to this anthology point out, Barack Obama deported more Mexicans than has Trump, though there were more arriving during Obama’s administration. Mexico, as linguist Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil points out, has its own brand of xenophobic nativists who wish to block off the country’s southern border: “Fear becomes hatred, and that hatred is given a legal justification, when in reality it’s nothing more than an administrative offense: coming into Mexico without papers is not a crime.” Walls, by the account of several contributors, speak to a failure of imagination, to say nothing of humanity. As Reforma founder and former editor René Delgado writes, the Trumpian wall to the north in particular represents "the deterioration of diplomacy, the perversion of politics, and something even worse: the capitalization of the misfortune of those who are forced to leave their country in search of opportunity.” Under Trump, in the guise of safeguarding the nation from “bad hombres,” the U.S. “has constructed the largest immigration detention infrastructure in the world,” infamous for holding illegal crossers—including many thousands of children—in what are called perreras, or dog pounds. When asked by novelist Valeria Luiselli whether she regretted trying to enter the U.S., one imprisoned woman said, “now I regret it, a thousand times. I think I’d rather die of one gunshot in my own country than let them kill me slowly in this one.” That one sentence speaks volumes about a system of injustice on both sides of the border that no wall, however high, can contain.
A welcome, necessary rejoinder to critics of border policy on this side of the line.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-62097-618-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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