From Indiana to Georgia to Maine, these intelligent model programs should inspire others.
Pragmatic approaches to incorporating the enormous waves of immigrants arriving in the United States.
As an outgrowth of her One Nation Indivisible project, Eaton (Director, Sillerman Center for the Advancement of Philanthropy/Brandeis Univ.; The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial, 2007, etc.) presents in discrete essays an array of compelling and persuasive regional efforts across the country that have risen in response to Arizona’s recent punitive immigration policy and others like it. Immigration has soared in the U.S., especially in the South, and in certain attractive pockets of the country, the local governments have had to come up with more creative, workable approaches to meeting the needs of the new settlers so that they can become full, participating members of the community. In contrast to the former embrace of “assimilation,” whereby immigrants were encouraged to suppress their native cultures and languages in favor of the values and interests of the “receiving community,” the current favored policy of “integration” allows immigrants to celebrate their own cultures side by side with those of receiving communities—so that, in theory, each enriches the other. Effectively, integration is being practiced successfully in schools, such as in Heber City, Utah, a conservative community that has seen its Latino population surge and thereby required a two-way immersion program. Eaton crisscrossed the country to investigate other examples of truly progressive approaches to immigration needs in surprising places—e.g., in Hinds County, Mississippi, where African-American legislators are advocating for the disenfranchised Latino community as a part of their deep-seated sense of civil rights. Some of the examples emerge from faith-minded groups—e.g., the Mormon community of Utah, the Tri-Faith Initiative of Omaha, Nebraska—yet the organizers speak just as forcefully about the economic incentive to help the new immigrants as the moral imperative.
From Indiana to Georgia to Maine, these intelligent model programs should inspire others.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62097-095-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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