A trenchant analysis of the forces surrounding queer displacement.
Buxton and Ritholtz discuss issues involving LGBTQ+ asylum in this scholarly work.
When considering the problem of displacement, it’s easy to get caught up in academic debates about legal rights or political institutions while overlooking the actual lived experience of displaced people. In this work, political philosopher Buxton and scholar of theoretical and empirical politics Ritholtz argue that the political theory of refuge must contend with conditions as they exist on the front lines of displacement. “By centering the experiences of the queer and trans displaced,” the authors write in their introduction, “we can illuminate the complexities and contradictions of seeking sanctuary in a persistently exclusionary global refugee regime.” The authors analyze, through an intersectional lens, the myriad forces that drive queer and trans displacement, often following the displaced over borders and into new lands. Readers meet Victor, a gay man from Nigeria who fled to the United Kingdom following attempts by his community to change his sexual orientation via starvation and exorcism; Judis, a trans woman from Ukraine who was unable to flee the country with other women during the Russian invasion due to border guards’ insistence that she was a man; and Victoria, an undocumented immigrant trans woman raised in the United States who was sent to a men’s detention facility and fatally denied her HIV medication. The authors propose new ways to approach the discussion in the hope of creating better outcomes for people ensnared in various patterns of persecution. Buxton and Ritholtz write for an academic audience, and their prose reflects their immersion in the language of theory. Even so, a sincere appreciation for the experiences of their subjects shines through the text. “Though we have not experienced anything close to what those in the stories that line our pages have,” they write, “we recognize the wisdom in their words and the theory in their actions.” Serious readers will appreciate this wide-ranging work.
A trenchant analysis of the forces surrounding queer displacement.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780520391765
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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