A fine contribution to the swirling discussion around citizenship, birthright or otherwise.
A first-generation American considers the contentious and timely issue of citizenship.
“Many people complain these days about the divisiveness of political life in the United States, as if it were only a matter of disagreeing over policies and values, when it could be said that we are at odds with one another because we do not live in the same country.” So writes Hernández, the child of a Colombian mother and Cuban father, who recognized early on that citizenship is a matter of luck—in her father’s case, the fact that he fled Cuba just when the U.S., embroiled in the Cold War, began to issue green cards freely to Cuban exiles. Though born in the shadow of the Andes, Hernández writes, her mother became a citizen thanks to the Caribbean. More to the point, in an interesting twist of argument, Hernández proposes that her parents “became citizens of the United States because this country’s empire extended into the Caribbean.” As she writes, citizenship has always been a politicized and racialized issue: Asians were barred from admission from the 1880s to the 1950s, Blacks were denied citizenship until 1868 and Native Americans until 1924, and anyone who held a green card could be deported at any time upon committing the most minor of crimes. Today, the federal government is deporting citizens and noncitizens alike, a project that began 30-odd years ago with a Republican bid to end jus soli, or birthright, citizenship, the Constitution be damned. One judge—a Taiwanese immigrant—has backed President Trump’s policies by arguing that citizenship need not be granted to “invading aliens,” and he’s said to be next in line for a Supreme Court nomination. Preparing for the worst, Hernández, as a “queer Latina,” closes her narrative by applying for and receiving dual Colombian citizenship—just in case.
A fine contribution to the swirling discussion around citizenship, birthright or otherwise.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593730171
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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