A carefully written investigation full of villains—and the occasional hero.
Fast-paced though complex account of ethnic collision among the fisheries of Gulf Coast Texas.
“This is a book about a racist backlash against refugees fleeing a ruinous war,” writes Johnson, author of The Feather Thief, to open a narrative that pits Vietnamese newcomers to East Texas against an array of enemies, most dangerously the KKK. When the Vietnamese arrived, they found few friends among the White fishermen of Galveston Bay, who were happy to sell those newcomers junk boats and machinery at exorbitant prices, as with one who “grinned at a reporter while describing the time he sold a boat to a Vietnamese shrimper for $25,000, even though he knew it was decrepit.” Meanwhile, Johnson notes, a Gallup poll soon after the fall of Saigon “showed only 36 percent of Americans believed refugees fleeing the calamitous war of their country’s own making deserved resettlement,” lending weight to the hostility on a homefront suddenly populated by a wave of 130,000 Vietnamese. One Anglo fisherman bought into the widely circulated lie that among the refugees were Viet Cong agents bent on destroying America, and he began terrorizing two young brothers in “Gook City,” one of whom killed their tormentor. Amazingly, he was acquitted by an all-White jury on the grounds of self-defense, which only lent energy to KKK members from far afield who came to chase the Vietnamese out. In another kind of radicalism, a Taiwanese manufacturer that had been dumping toxic chemicals into the bay, poisoning the fishery, met local resistance that included both Anglos and Vietnamese. In the end, the KKK dwindled away, but “the White supremacist movement charged ahead.” Even though most shrimp consumed here is imported, Johnson observes that the domestic crop is largely brought to market by Vietnamese fishermen. His fascinating and disturbing narrative is a winning mix of biography, true crime, and ecological study.
A carefully written investigation full of villains—and the occasional hero.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-984880-12-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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