A compelling, if at times uneven, argument for reforming deportation policy.
Tramonte and Setty combine personal stories with analysis of public policy to provide an overview of the problems with deportations from the United States.
Through interviews, the authors (Tramonte is a communications consultant and director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance; Setty is a senior policy analyst on the immigration and immigrant families team at the Center for Law and Social Policy) have collected the experiences of more than 250 people who have been deported from the United States—deportations that have created “lasting and unnecessary damage on ordinary people.” Their study focuses primarily on the effects on families, leading to analyses of the larger impacts on communities and society as a whole. Many of the personal stories referenced stem from “massive, SWAT-team style raids” throughout northern Ohio conducted by Trump’s ICE following his election and contain devastating testimony from the individuals who lived these experiences. Tramonte and Setty dig into research on the layers of harm resulting from events such as loss of income, children falling into poverty, mental health issues, physical health issues, and more. This research informs their concrete analysis as they go through the Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations to detail how systemic racism has affected immigration law and how more and more people have become eligible for deportation. The authors conclude with recommendations for improving the system. Tramonte and Setty’s breakdown of immigration policy across administrations is particularly enlightening and insightful, and the stories they have collected are potent and powerful, such as that of Seyni Diagne, who received no treatment for his cancer or hepatitis C, neither in ICE detention nor after being sent to jail in Mauritania, his country of origin. In organizing and building their overall argument, however, the authors’ use of a personal perspective versus a more critical, scientific eye feels unbalanced; certain stories are referenced anecdotally without the same background or gravitas as others. Even as it builds to a compelling thesis on immigration, the book feels unsure of the best rhetorical strategy for getting there.
A compelling, if at times uneven, argument for reforming deportation policy.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2023
ISBN: 9798988862420
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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