An important, deeply felt look at lives in constant peril.
A powerful collection of stories from refugees stuck in asylum limbo in Greece.
The early 21st century has seen a rise in authoritarianism and anti-immigration sentiment, both of which have emerged alongside—or perhaps in response to—explosive levels of poverty, armed conflict, and climate change. In this book, journalism professor Benedict and Syrian writer Awwadawnan humanize the plight of the 84 million people “forcibly displaced” as a result of these issues by presenting the narratives of asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Cameroon. After difficult, often terrifying journeys, these men and women landed in Greece, the "major gateway to Europe” for people fleeing social, political, and/or economic oppression. Yet because of a 2016 agreement between the European Union and an immigrant-inundated Turkey, Greek refugee camps have become like prisons. Asmahan, a woman fleeing the Syrian civil war, observes that individuals, and sometimes entire families, are forced to live in shipping containers for months on end while awaiting word on their asylum status. Even when she arrived at a slightly more accommodating camp, Asmahan notes that “we were still prisoners, and we were still forced to feel that we were nothing but creatures made to eat, sleep and submit.” Woman and girls are especially vulnerable to the violence that plagues these camps; assaults and rapes are rarely reported due to fear of retaliation. Even when refugees are granted permits to travel around Greece, their lives are still filled with tremendous struggle. Hasan, another Syrian, recounts his own difficulties with poor housing, poverty, ill health, and hostility from Greeks, even those who ran the local hospital in the town where he lived. Gut-wrenching and necessary, this book sharply depicts an escalating humanitarian crisis that shows few signs of slowing down. In the epilogue, the authors provide updates on their subjects.
An important, deeply felt look at lives in constant peril.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-80444-001-8
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Footnote Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.
A deeply informed critique of the malicious initiatives currently using gender as a political tool to arouse fear and strengthen political and religious institutions.
In their latest book, following The Force of Nonviolence, Butler, the noted philosopher and gender studies scholar, documents and debunks the anti-gender ideology of the right, the core principle of which is that male and female are natural categories whose recognition is essential for the survival of the family, nations, and patriarchal order. Its proponents reject “sex” as a malleable category infused with prior political and cultural understandings. By turning gender into a “phantasmatic scene,” they enable those in positions of authority to deflect attention from such world-destroying forces as war, predatory capitalism, and climate change. Butler explores the ideology’s presence in the U.S., the U.K., Uganda, and Hungary, countries where legislation has limited the rights of trans and homosexual people and denied them their sexual identity. The author also delves into the ideology’s roots among Evangelicals and the Catholic Church and such political leaders as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Butler is particularly bothered by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who treat trans women as “male predators in disguise.” For the author, “the gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never be fully closed.” They imagine “a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable” and calls for alliances across differences and “a radical democracy informed by socialist values.” Butler compensates for the thinness of some of their recommendations with an astute dissection of the ideology’s core ideas and impressive grasp of its intellectual pretensions. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and impassioned book on a critically important centerpiece of contemporary authoritarianism and patriarchy.
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780374608224
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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