Sharp-eyed and unsparing.
A writer and immigrant rights activist’s account of his long path to citizenship and critique of United States immigration policies, especially regarding undocumented workers.
In July 2011, just a few months after his 26th birthday, Orduña, a Mexican national who lived most of his life in the U.S., became a naturalized American citizen. Though he felt no different than he had before, he knew that citizenship would allow him “to join [a] club” that previously had been closed to him. Yet due to what he had seen his hardworking Mexican immigrant parents undergo as “removable aliens” with expired visas and what he knew of the history and lives of other undocumented Mexican immigrants, he could not accept his new status uncritically. Orduña examines his personal experiences as an immigrant in the context of the racist, contradictory, and sometimes-punitive American immigration system. Fully aware that the American dream has been built on the exploitation of workers like his parents, he excoriates media portrayals of illegal immigrants as invaders that threaten the “health of many Americans.” Such pathologizing narratives have given rise to distrust—heightened by post–9/11 paranoia—of dark-skinned “others” like the author. Xenophobia is embedded in everything from interactions with immigration officials to the many other procedures immigrants must contend with. Orduña bitterly observes the process leading up to his actual naturalization: his “whereabouts, purchases and behaviors [had to be made] known” and cataloged just as his “associates [had to be] scrutinized and his “intentions justified.” Though the author was ultimately successful in his pursuit of citizenship, dealing with the immigration system—and by extension, the U.S. government—was like being “trapped in an abusive relationship with a sociopath.” Articulate and timely, Orduña’s book probes the underside of the American dream while offering a fierce vision of the way race and class continue to shape government policy in a country that still bills itself as the land of opportunity for all.
Sharp-eyed and unsparing.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7401-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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