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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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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