A moving and timely book that strips away misleading politics to reveal the complexities of real human lives.
A collection of stories of refugees in America from the founder of the Every Campus a Refuge organization.
Jordan-born Abdo, a professor of English at Guilford College, where she founded ECAR, begins with her own experience as the daughter and granddaughter of Palestinian refugees. She then introduces readers to seven refugees from around the world—Palestine, Burma, Uganda, Iraq, Syria—who have started new lives near where the author lives in North Carolina. Stressing repeatedly that anyone can become a refugee, Abdo effectively demonstrates what many in the U.S. fail to grasp: “All refugees have lived lives that are distinct and individual—complicated, rich, layered. Something happens in their lives that fractures them from their souls, their homes. A fracture that threatens their safety. And it is a fracture they are not allowed to forget. Their future depends on forever remembering their persecution.” By following the unique journeys of these courageous individuals, the author reveals the often terrifying and overwhelming process of resettlement. These biographical portraits are thorough and compassionate, covering the initial reason for escape, life in refugee camps, endless questioning by various government agencies, and countless obstacles to putting down roots in a strange land. Abdo ends with an in-depth examination of the politicized and sometimes racist terms used to describe refugees, nearly all of whom merely seek a better life. Unfortunately, most don’t find it. Even with organizations like ECAR, writes the author, “less than 1 percent of the world’s refugees are ever resettled. The majority of refugees remain, sometimes for generations, in camps a bomb-sound away from the towns they fled, across a relatively recently created national border.” By humanizing and contextualizing the refugee experience, Abdo forces readers to confront their own preconceived notions about a global crisis that will only become more widespread in the years to come.
A moving and timely book that strips away misleading politics to reveal the complexities of real human lives.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 979-1-58642-342-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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