An unusual firsthand report from the immigration wars.
As if to dare the attorney general to come find him, Philippines-born immigrant journalist Vargas, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, owns up to being “illegal”—but not criminal.
As the author’s account opens and closes, he has been arrested in preparation for a “removal proceeding,” the consequence of his mother’s decision to put him on a plane with a supposed uncle and send him to the promised land of the United States at the age of 12 in 1993. That uncle was a smuggler, and the life Vargas found wasn’t all that it was supposed to be; neither did he have the papers—real ones, anyway—to support things like getting a driver’s license or going to the polls. Given the mood of the nation, which, as the author notes, officially no longer characterizes itself as “a nation of immigrants,” it’s understandable that he is perplexed and worried at his situation, perhaps less intuitively so that he should confess it in a book that almost certainly will not change many minds: Those opposed to immigration, illegal and legal, will dismiss his pleas, and those for it will share his indignation. Of more interest to readers on the middle ground, if there are any, is the author’s account of how few and technically complex the supposed paths for legal immigration are these days—and how easy it is to be deported. Thus he had to wrestle when, having appeared on-air to discuss his plea, he was invited by Nancy Pelosi to be her guest in Congress, an invitation that an immigration-lawyer friend urged him to decline: “It took .25 seconds for the Breitbart website to pull up 725 articles under the search ‘Jose Antonio Vargas.’ Breitbart runs immigration policy in the United States.” Though in fact detained, the author was released and now lives in a kind of legal limbo while waiting to see what, if anything, will happen.
An unusual firsthand report from the immigration wars.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-285135-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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