An eyebrow-raising report on education that is both enraging and heartbreaking.
Refugees fight for education equality in a Pennsylvania school system.
In a sleek, knowledgeable study, award-winning journalist Napolitano focuses primarily on the experience of a young Sudanese teenager. As the eldest daughter, 18-year-old Khadidja Issa had high hopes and dreams when her family immigrated to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, after escaping war-torn Sudan in 2015. Though she was told that her education would begin at the local high school, when she attempted to enroll, she was told she had aged out and to seek employment instead even though her younger siblings were all accepted at their respective grade schools. Other refugees received the same judgment. When Khadidja and other interested teens pressed the Pennsylvania school system further, they were given the option of being deferred to Phoenix Academy, a notoriously authoritarian, juvenile detention–like facility with a nasty reputation as a school for “at-risk youth.” Frightened and fearful of the academy, Khadidja and her fellow refugee students decided to fight the district to afford them the proper education they deserved. Championed by a driven caseworker, an incensed and determined Khadidja, and a pro bono attorney, the ACLU and other litigants challenged the Lancaster school district’s sketchy admissions policies in a class-action case that rocked the region. Napolitano retraces Khadidja’s history with great dexterity, detailing the family’s terror-stricken homeland and their time at a decrepit refugee camp in Chad. Through their struggle, the author paints a broader portrait of the unfortunately common xenophobia that refugees have always faced in the U.S., prejudice that increased considerably during the Trump administration. Backed by research, profiles, court testimonies, and interviews with teachers, refugees, and immigrant advocates, the book calls into question the vital essence of education and why, even in this modern era of accountability, these injustices persist.
An eyebrow-raising report on education that is both enraging and heartbreaking.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2498-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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