A surprisingly satisfying tribute to the vigor that immigrants bring to the nation’s culture and economy.
The former president takes up brush and pen to portray nearly four dozen immigrants and highlight their contributions.
Bush’s latest book reveals a couple of things. One is that any discussion of immigration reform is likely to be difficult and even a little schizophrenic. The author argues for strongly enforced borders, a thorough reform of the immigration system, and “full assimilation of immigrants into the American economy and culture.” Another is that the former president has, like Dwight Eisenhower, become a serviceable painter in his retirement. The political point is the more important, though Bush protests that he withheld publication until the 2020 election had passed lest any of his subjects become political hostages. As well they might have: One of the immigrants is a Mexican man who arrived illegally as a teenager, worked as a mechanic and painter, and then founded a produce company that nets $60 million per year. Though he became a citizen along the way, that’s just the sort of thing to set a nativist’s blood boiling. Arnold Schwarzenegger, depicted with a horsey grin and an Uncle Sam top hat, subtly addresses those nativists: “I wish every American realized that being born here is the greatest opportunity. You don’t know how lucky you are. And because of that, it’s our duty to do everything in our power to leave a better America to the next generation.” Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright take their places alongside a North Korean refugee who works in Bush’s organization and an Iraqi interpreter who legally changed his name to Tony George Bush. A few of Bush’s subjects are of modest achievement, but many, including Dominican baseball star Albert Pujols and Swedish-born golf celebrity Annika Sörenstam, have made outsize marks. The author also includes a two-page flow chart that shows the impossibly complex ways (there are four of them) “to obtain a green card” in the U.S.
A surprisingly satisfying tribute to the vigor that immigrants bring to the nation’s culture and economy.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13696-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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