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STORMING THE WALL

CLIMATE CHANGE, MIGRATION, AND HOMELAND SECURITY

A galvanizing forecast of global warming’s endgame and a powerful indictment of America’s current stance.

A well-researched and grim exploration of the connections between climate change and the political hostility toward the refugees it creates.

Journalist and activist Miller (Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security, 2014) expands on his earlier focus on U.S.–Mexico border controversies with an alarming catalog of climatological effects on population movements, surveillance, violence, and other current issues. “The theater for future climate battles,” he writes, “will be the world’s ever thickening border zones…vast numbers of people will be on the move, and vast numbers of people will be trained, armed, and paid to stop them.” In eight punchy, discretely themed chapters, the author establishes that the destructive effects of climate change are already manifest and that the U.S. is establishing a violent, heavy-handed pattern of response to it, as seen in the ramping up of border security. Miller visited several locales to witness this bleak transition, including Honduras and the U.S.–Mexico border, and he argues that these developing strife zones, far from representing natural change, are fundamentally class-based phenomena: “In the climate era, coexisting worlds of luxury living and impoverished desperation will only be magnified and compounded.” Ironically, the American military is committed to scientifically based preparation for coming crises, as is private enterprise. Miller also visited security conventions to see how the same corporatized elites who resist climate-change measures like the Paris Agreement will benefit financially from its increasing ill effects. He emphasizes that the harrowing confluence among climate disasters and militarized responses on behalf of elites is already prominent, noting that murders of activists skyrocketed in the Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan, comparable to the use of privatized security to resegregate New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Miller makes a convincing, chilling argument based on an effective synthesis of research, interviews, and personal observation, and the impact is only slightly undercut by an occasionally shrill or pedantic tone.

A galvanizing forecast of global warming’s endgame and a powerful indictment of America’s current stance.

Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-87286-715-4

Page Count: 248

Publisher: City Lights

Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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