A disguised and convoluted history made decipherable and urgent.
A detailed explanation of the discrimination undergirding the American immigration system from its inception.
Lytle Hernández (Bad Mexicans, 2022) reaches past the familiar citations and justifications of modern-day positions from various political corners and roots the United States’ immigration system in the terrified reaction of white slaveowners in the wake of the Haiti slave revolt that began in 1791. Her long view follows the shift of migration control from state to federal jurisdiction, stripping human protections along the way. Her detailed accounting is grounded by Supreme Court decisions, lawmakers’ commissions, and fluctuations in foreign policy that lay bare three fundamental patterns that must be addressed by anyone working in American immigration policy today: a longstanding and systemically embedded preference for white, European immigrants; the unrestrained power and discretion of the federal government regarding immigration and naturalization and their enforcement; and the entwinement of immigration concerns with the capitalist labor market. Lytle Hernández’s narrative bursts with relevance to current headlines regarding everything from the Border Patrol to detainment centers. There are few true heroes; villains are not only overtly malicious, calculating, and strategic in their legal and political maneuvering, but also negotiators who fail to forestall the more extreme implications of their compromises. The author’s text is meant to be “a dismantling history—and act of sabotage,” and, if the reader is left with few tactical suggestions for disassembling the machine, they are nevertheless granted a more actionable understanding of both the exclusionary agenda anchoring immigration operations and the missteps of past efforts at progress. Rather than perseverating on particular quotas and regional flavors of anti-immigrant sentiment, she uses such unassailable data to demonstrate the human stakes of the country’s current contentious debates, as well as the human viciousness—and obliviousness, sometimes willful—behind modern-day panic and public talking points.
A disguised and convoluted history made decipherable and urgent.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2026
ISBN: 9781324117094
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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