A well-paced and engaging account, highly relevant to current political debates.
Ambitious exposé of the troubled immigration system as seen through the lens of two African migrants’ experiences.
Meno, a professor of creative writing and prolific fiction writer, tracks the grueling journeys of his complexly rendered protagonists, Razak and Seidu, both from Ghana, one fleeing a murderous family dispute, the other a promising soccer player facing persecution after being outed as bisexual. The author portrays them convincingly as hapless pawns in a massive explosion of migration, countered in the Americas with greed and cruelty. Even for those with legitimate reasons to seek shelter, like his protagonists, “the asylum process in the U.S. has become its own inviolable system.” The narrative is both sprawling and controlled, as Meno alternates between a terrifying account of their attempts to reach safety across the Canadian border during a blizzard and the longer-term arc of their improbable, brutal journeys as migrants. Both men traveled through Central America, facing constant danger and abuse. Applying for asylum at the American border, they discovered an unfortunate truth: that the post–9/11 realignment of homeland security “had far-reaching political and cultural consequences, immediately changing how refugees and asylum seekers were publicly viewed.” Razak was detained for two years at a remote private prison, feeling “he had been taken out of the world.” Seidu was also detained, eventually bonded to his brother’s custody: “It was almost too much, this homecoming, this feeling of unabashed love and support” Yet, despite his credible fear, his request for asylum was denied without explanation, prompting his flight to Canada. Similarly, Razak found a life in New York but fled north after being scheduled for deportation. The narrative is dispiriting, as Meno documents the Kafkaesque, for-profit reality of today’s immigration morass, but Meno writes deftly, with a fine sense of detail and place, bringing an all-too-common story to life.
A well-paced and engaging account, highly relevant to current political debates.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64009-314-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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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