A timely, well-informed entry into a national debate.
An incisive look at immigration, assimilation, and national identity.
Award-winning journalist and NPR correspondent Gjelten (Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba, 2008, etc.) probes the immigrant experience after the 1965 Immigrant and Nationality Act, passed under Lyndon Johnson’s administration. This dramatic reform did away with quotas that privileged European ancestry; gave preference to spouses, minor children, and parents of immigrants who became citizens; and allocated 165,000 slots for others, half for those with “exceptional skills or education deemed ‘especially advantageous’ to the United States.” Although many lawmakers maintained that the act would not substantially change the country’s identity, some political scientists expressed consternation about assimilation: would immigrants comprise a permanent underclass—or worse, a threat—if they did not adopt what Samuel Huntington called “America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and political values?” As Seymour Martin Lipset put it, “becoming American was…an ideological act.” Now, 50 years after the act’s passage, Gjelten focuses on Fairfax, Virginia, a county that by 2010 had undergone “stunning demographic transformation.” In 1980, 9 percent of residents were foreign-born; by 2000, immigrants populated 40 percent of one unit of the county and 25 percent overall. Official publications were translated into six languages, hardly representing the more than 100 languages spoken in Fairfax. Based on interviews, Gjelten portrays in rich detail five immigrant families from Korea, Libya, and Bolivia, revealing the economic, social, political, and personal challenges for first- and second-generation family members. He examines schools’ responses to changing populations, the Muslims’ struggles as they met with ostracism after 9/11, new immigrants’ relationships with African-Americans, backlash incited by illegal immigration, and recent calls for new curbs. In a book reflecting Gjelten’s many years reporting overseas, he concludes that immigration has neither diluted national identity nor led to cultural separatism but, he optimistically sees, has enriched the nation, creating a new sense of “we.”
A timely, well-informed entry into a national debate.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4385-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
