A remarkable, unnerving, and cautionary portrait of a global immigration crisis.
A journalist’s self-aware exploration of borders and the myths used to draw them.
Markham, author of The Far Away Brothers, has spent two decades reporting from some of the world’s most chaotic borders, telling the stories of those left at their mercy. In her latest book, she takes a heartbreaking account—of a fire that decimated a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos and the Afghan youth falsely accused of setting it—and winds it together with her family’s history of immigrating from Greece, as well as commentary on the entanglement of human migration and existence itself. The author chronicles her interviews with residents of the camp, the legal team for the accused, the Greek residents who surrounded them with varying degrees of hospitality and sympathy, and members of her own family. She also draws from the insight and wisdom of Soviet refugee Svetlana Boym. Greece’s position in the Western imagination—reflected in its myths and its influences on Western thought and even whiteness—and its often misrepresented history, create a thought-provoking and frustratingly circular backdrop for Markham’s endeavor, one often ignored or obscured in even the most probing media coverage. Many of the narrative threads could justify being their own book, and the author’s tight prose, character-driven storytelling, and humility clearly demonstrate the desperation at the heart of forced migration. She effectively calls out the callousness of the creators of, investors in, and patrollers of borders. Markham’s refreshingly self-conscious rumination on the project of a journalist, as well as her understanding of both the potential pitfalls and possible impact of her empathetic text, reinforce her interrogation of the “stories humans have created to make sense of our existence,” the maps we have drawn to depict those stories, and the elusive nature of truth.
A remarkable, unnerving, and cautionary portrait of a global immigration crisis.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780593545577
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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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