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VIOLENT BORDERS

REFUGEES AND THE RIGHT TO MOVE

With the building of border walls and the deaths of migrants much in the news, this work is both timely and necessarily...

“Tear down this wall!” was Ronald Reagan’s ringing challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. Now, a geographer calls for more drastic action, arguing that border walls everywhere should come down.

In his earlier book, Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel (2012), Jones (Univ. of Hawaii, Manoa) explored three specific border walls; here, he takes a broader and longer view. In the first half of the book, the author looks at the causes and consequences of global migration, visiting borders around the world and telling the stories of people who have experienced their violent reality. The second half takes a historical approach, as Jones examines other types of enclosures on land and sea and borders as part of a long-term effort to control the movement of the poor. He views borders as producers of violence, creating and enforcing economic disparities and ultimately causing the deaths of thousands and damaging the environment. Since 9/11, barriers have been justified in the name of security, but Jones argues that they have actually been driven by the wall-building state’s desire to protect its wealth and the cultural practices of its citizens. At borders, notes the author, mobility is violently restricted as migrants are funneled into dangerous crossing points, and the security infrastructure leads to thousands of deaths annually. In addition to the cost in human lives, Jones cites damage to the environment; dividing the world into sovereign territories that place the interests of certain citizens above those of humanity as a whole has contributed to the global failure to address climate change. In his conclusion, the author idealistically calls for opening borders to allow free movement and establishing rules for working conditions and environmental protection.

With the building of border walls and the deaths of migrants much in the news, this work is both timely and necessarily provocative.

Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-78478-471-3

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Verso

Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.

Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

Pub Date: July 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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