A vital guide to American refugee policy, both historically exacting and thoughtful.
A remarkably comprehensive history of American refugee policy since the Vietnam War written by one of its chief architects.
Following the Fall of Saigon in 1975 and the withdrawal of American military forces, a catastrophic humanitarian disaster loomed: the “systematic persecution and inevitable flight of multitudes of Indochinese,” a terrifying “refugee storm.” The predicament proved too dire for the existing agencies in the United States to manage, and, in 1979, Chas Freeman, a Foreign Service officer, issued a momentous report calling for the establishment of a Bureau of Refugee Programs, the “first standalone organization with refugees as its exclusive raison d’être.” Debut author Purcell was instrumental in the establishment of the agency and served as its director for several of its embryonic years. The author, with an extraordinary eye for painstaking detail that is by turns impressive and exhausting, tells the story of the agency’s founding, including the governmental barriers, its intramural “existential threats” and congressional antagonisms,” as well as the problems posed by a “lumbering” U.S. State Department. The Refugee Programs bureau expanded to manage refugee crises all over the globe—the Middle East, the Soviet Union, Latin America, and beyond—always in search of “durable solutions,” which included “voluntary repatriation, regional settlement, and third country resettlement.” With great analytical rigor and candor, Purcell depicts the RP’s missteps as well as its ultimate emergence as a rare bureaucratic organization, both nimble and motivated by a profound sense of moral purpose. “As I have tried to demonstrate, the United States succeeded in this mission by melding humane foreign policy with a can-do, coherent entity that quickly became one of the State Department’s most dynamic organizations,” he writes. The history the author furnishes is a sprawling one and includes an account of the nation’s shifting attitudes toward outsiders, from one of “guarded openness” through “isolation and self-sufficiency” to “global engagement in humanitarian solutions.” Further, he provides a searching discussion of the special challenges posed by the recent Syrian refugee crisis. This is an authoritative guide to the subject, consistently perspicacious and lucid, and includes a foreword by former Secretary of State George P. Shultz.
A vital guide to American refugee policy, both historically exacting and thoughtful.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4808-6881-6
Page Count: 558
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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