A gorgeously written, uniquely insightful, and evenly critical volume that hits every talking point on immigration today.
A powerful examination of one of the day’s most important topics: global migration.
In many ways, the latest from New York Times reporter DeParle (American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare, 2004), a George Polk Award winner, is a summary effort of the past three decades of his core research that began in the Philippines when he was a much younger reporter launching his career. Some of the close relationships he forged during his time there became lifelong friendships—and helped lead to this crucial and timely volume about the increasingly explosive and controversial phenomenon of global migration. Three decades ago, when the author was reporting on the poverty of the shantytowns of Manila, he met Tita Comodas, who reluctantly took him in as a boarder. Unable to provide for his family, Emet, Tita’s husband, was forced to take a job abroad in Saudi Arabia, and he spent the next 20 years living far from his loved ones in order to send remittances home and afford his children a higher standard of life. Identifying the book’s title as the family mantra, DeParle focuses on their daughter, Rosalie, then a 15-year-old studying nursing. He follows her through the years as she graduated and took nursing jobs abroad, eventually arriving in Galveston, Texas, and her own lifelong dream fulfilled: a job in the U.S. Moving in and out of the narrative of Rosalie’s journey, the author chronicles her daily struggles, tying them to the bigger picture of migration movements and globalism as well as the economic, political, and cultural particulars of immigration in North America. DeParle also weighs in on immigration in the European Union while expanding on the economic effects of family remittances on a national and global scale. Giving a human face to the issue of immigration, the author does a great service to his readers and his subjects.
A gorgeously written, uniquely insightful, and evenly critical volume that hits every talking point on immigration today.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-670-78592-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
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
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
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