A clear, compact, and well-researched study of immigrant health care issues.
Reimann and Rodríguez-Reimann offer a concise overview of the issues associated with immigrant health care.
In this entry in the Immigrant Strides Toward Prosperity series, the authors (Reimann is a clinical psychologist, Rodríguez-Reimann an executive at the Group for Immigrant Resettlement and Assessment) survey a broad array of the health challenges facing immigrants in their new environments. They touch on major physical issues, including tuberculosis and Covid-19, as well as the range of mental issues associated with stress (including PTSD) related to various autoimmune disorders. (“Experiencing continuous stress in which the body releases adrenaline over a longer period of time can result in continuous inflammation and other health issues. For example, chronic stress can create a physical process that leads to type 2 diabetes.”) The authors also discuss seemingly more mundane matters, such as proper dental care, noting that “even small differences in healthcare practices between countries can sow confusion.” Reimann and Rodríguez-Reimann detail the numerous psychological problems that many immigrants face when dealing with unresolved grief or trauma stemming from displacement, rape, or torture, and they stress the importance of community health workers (CHWs), known as promotoras, in bridging the gap between cultures; they note that community leaders with some health care knowledge can connect immigrant groups with health care providers. The authors also include brief insets with health care stories drawn from their personal experiences, a glossary of medical terms, and a full and detailed reference section. Reimann and Rodríguez-Reimann write with clarity and obvious knowledge, and their comprehensive approach will make this book an invaluable starting point for people working at all levels of immigrant health care. The book’s overall tone of informed hope is uplifting; with the world’s immigrant population continuing to rise every year, the need for books like this will become increasingly pressing to everybody on the front lines of overburdened health care services.
A clear, compact, and well-researched study of immigrant health care issues.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781955658164
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Romo Books
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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