An invaluable contribution to the contemporary debate over Muslim immigration and integration into Western communities.
Globe and Mail European bureau chief Saunders (Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World, 2011) examines the fearful reaction of today's native-born Western Europeans and North Americans to Muslim immigration.
The author takes a nuanced, informative look at the alarm that has greeted the latest wave of Muslim immigrants to Western countries and explains, with admirable precision, why this response is unjustified. In a methodical, point-by-point approach, Saunders analyzes the myths from which Western fears of a “Muslim takeover” have sprung, as well as the actual facts surrounding Muslim immigration patterns and population trends—e.g., birth rates are actually falling in many Muslim immigrant communities. The author argues that early-21st-century Muslim sentiment in the West is nearly identical in origin to the anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish fervor that swept the same region when immigration from those communities increased in the early-20th century. Few Americans today recall Paul Blanshard's 1949 book American Freedom and Catholic Power, but it was a massively popular bestseller in which the author warned—in terms strikingly similar to those employed by the authors of contemporary books about the threat of Muslim immigration—that fast-breeding Catholics, left unchecked, would eventually seek to gain control of the American presidency and implement a “Catholic plan for America.” In the last section, Saunders provides a sober reflection on “the genuine problems and challenges of immigration” (as opposed to the trumped-up, hysterical anti-Muslim myths the author so effectively eviscerates in earlier sections). Saunders' approach is refreshingly levelheaded and fact-based; he reproaches those who have allowed fear and anger to overwhelm reason, while acknowledging that terrorism and religious extremism pose real dangers to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
An invaluable contribution to the contemporary debate over Muslim immigration and integration into Western communities.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95117-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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