A powerful, well-researched survey of the lives of agricultural guest workers.
Durbin explores the hidden lives of H-2A temporary agricultural workers in this nonfiction work.
At its inception in 1987, the H-2A visa program certified just over 40 positions for temporary nonimmigrant workers to enter the United States. Today, the number of so-called guest workers, most of whom are Mexican men who leave their families for seasonal crop work, has soared to more than 300,000. This look into the lives of seasonal agricultural workers in eastern North Carolina begins in Mexico as men like 60-year-old Domingo Álvarez begin a multiday transnational bus trip from their home to the Tar Heel State. While the contributions of guest workers to the American economy receive ample coverage (“We need them. They need us,” Durbin writes), what makes this book stand out is its deeply personal narrative. Readers learn about the rompecabezas de enredo (handmade entanglement puzzles made from wires and cords) that one older migrant makes for the journey; social dynamics that exist inside worker communities (where the mayordomo is “the most-senior member of a grower’s crew…who can speak enough English to receive instructions from the grower, or patrón”); and how workers communicate with family via Facebook and WhatsApp messages. While many note how work in the United States has provided them with “a better economic situation,” the workers’ living conditions and tenuous employment, exacerbated by abusive growers, have also bred a culture of “fear of retaliation” among many who declined to have their names published. (Although he uses pseudonyms, Durbin assures readers that the workers referenced are not composites, but real people he interviewed or witnessed firsthand.) He observes that, as sincere as nonprofit organizations (particularly the Episcopalian ministry that the author tagged along with while researching the book) may be in their desire to assist workers, their needs far outweigh the available charity. One worker, for example, was given a bag of ground coffee from a local church, but it sat unused on his shelf, since he had no way to brew it.
Using interviews with more than 80 farmworkers, in addition to the “few growers willing to speak with me,” Durbin has assembled a revealing look into the lived experiences of guest workers. The author is nonpartisan in his analysis of the complexities of U.S. immigration policy; while emphasizing the “extraordinary sacrifices” made by farmworkers with H-2A visas, Durbin makes a compelling case that “we as a nation can honor that sacrifice” by improving guest workers’ working and living conditions. The author of multiple books on financial derivatives who has taught at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and spent a career in software engineering for the banking industry, Durbin presents poignant anecdotes accompanied by impressive quantitative analyses backed by more than 20 pages of citations and bibliographic entries. Graphs, charts, and other visual aids accompany each chapter, making the more analytical passages accessible for nonacademic readers.
A powerful, well-researched survey of the lives of agricultural guest workers.Pub Date: June 24, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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