A powerful, well-researched survey of the lives of agricultural guest workers.
Durbin explores the hidden lives of H-2A temporary agricultural workers in this nonfiction work.
At its inception in 1987, the H-2A visa program certified just over 40 positions for temporary nonimmigrant workers to enter the United States. Today, the number of so-called guest workers, most of whom are Mexican men who leave their families for seasonal crop work, has soared to more than 300,000. This look into the lives of seasonal agricultural workers in eastern North Carolina begins in Mexico as men like 60-year-old Domingo Álvarez begin a multiday transnational bus trip from their home to the Tar Heel State. While the contributions of guest workers to the American economy receive ample coverage (“We need them. They need us,” Durbin writes), what makes this book stand out is its deeply personal narrative. Readers learn about the rompecabezas de enredo (handmade entanglement puzzles made from wires and cords) that one older migrant makes for the journey; social dynamics that exist inside worker communities (where the mayordomo is “the most-senior member of a grower’s crew…who can speak enough English to receive instructions from the grower, or patrón”); and how workers communicate with family via Facebook and WhatsApp messages. While many note how work in the United States has provided them with “a better economic situation,” the workers’ living conditions and tenuous employment, exacerbated by abusive growers, have also bred a culture of “fear of retaliation” among many who declined to have their names published. (Although he uses pseudonyms, Durbin assures readers that the workers referenced are not composites, but real people he interviewed or witnessed firsthand.) He observes that, as sincere as nonprofit organizations (particularly the Episcopalian ministry that the author tagged along with while researching the book) may be in their desire to assist workers, their needs far outweigh the available charity. One worker, for example, was given a bag of ground coffee from a local church, but it sat unused on his shelf, since he had no way to brew it.
Using interviews with more than 80 farmworkers, in addition to the “few growers willing to speak with me,” Durbin has assembled a revealing look into the lived experiences of guest workers. The author is nonpartisan in his analysis of the complexities of U.S. immigration policy; while emphasizing the “extraordinary sacrifices” made by farmworkers with H-2A visas, Durbin makes a compelling case that “we as a nation can honor that sacrifice” by improving guest workers’ working and living conditions. The author of multiple books on financial derivatives who has taught at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and spent a career in software engineering for the banking industry, Durbin presents poignant anecdotes accompanied by impressive quantitative analyses backed by more than 20 pages of citations and bibliographic entries. Graphs, charts, and other visual aids accompany each chapter, making the more analytical passages accessible for nonacademic readers.
A powerful, well-researched survey of the lives of agricultural guest workers.Pub Date: June 24, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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