A welcome, necessary rejoinder to critics of border policy on this side of the line.
A gathering of critical responses to the border crisis by Mexican poets, scholars, and activists.
Donald Trump is unquestionably the dark lord of this piece. Writes novelist Boullosa, “his peculiar blend of racism and xenophobia, opportunism and cynicism, foolishness and cunning, cruelty and hypocrisy demands attention.” Yet Trump is not alone. As several of the contributors to this anthology point out, Barack Obama deported more Mexicans than has Trump, though there were more arriving during Obama’s administration. Mexico, as linguist Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil points out, has its own brand of xenophobic nativists who wish to block off the country’s southern border: “Fear becomes hatred, and that hatred is given a legal justification, when in reality it’s nothing more than an administrative offense: coming into Mexico without papers is not a crime.” Walls, by the account of several contributors, speak to a failure of imagination, to say nothing of humanity. As Reforma founder and former editor René Delgado writes, the Trumpian wall to the north in particular represents "the deterioration of diplomacy, the perversion of politics, and something even worse: the capitalization of the misfortune of those who are forced to leave their country in search of opportunity.” Under Trump, in the guise of safeguarding the nation from “bad hombres,” the U.S. “has constructed the largest immigration detention infrastructure in the world,” infamous for holding illegal crossers—including many thousands of children—in what are called perreras, or dog pounds. When asked by novelist Valeria Luiselli whether she regretted trying to enter the U.S., one imprisoned woman said, “now I regret it, a thousand times. I think I’d rather die of one gunshot in my own country than let them kill me slowly in this one.” That one sentence speaks volumes about a system of injustice on both sides of the border that no wall, however high, can contain.
A welcome, necessary rejoinder to critics of border policy on this side of the line.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-62097-618-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
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