A powerful exposé of the human costs of America’s immigration policies.
Towle, an educator and activist, confronts America’s immigration system in this debut nonfiction book.
“Whatever the answer” to America’s immigration crisis, writes the author, “a dream deferred—dried up like a raisin in the sun—is indeed justice denied.” To refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants from around the world, America has long stood as a haven of peace, prosperity, and freedom. Over the last two decades, however, the U.S. has been at the forefront of a new global paradigm that prioritizes national security above human rights, per Towle’s eye-opening narrative. Focusing on what she calls the “Border Industrial Complex,” the author outlines the ways in which the U.S. and Europe have forged a system of “global apartheid” through draconian visa requirements, passport controls, border walls, and other anti-immigration policies. The book offers readers an astute analysis that provides a well-researched overview of the current immigration system as well as historical context for the ways in which racism and xenophobia have shaped American policy in the past. Bipartisan in her critiques, Towle traces the modern roots of America’s anti-immigration ethos from Reagan through Clinton to the post-9/11 Bush administration, though she also holds the Obama and Biden administrations to account for their subsequent complicity. The book stands out by centering the lived experiences of the victims of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), particularly the subagency known as Enforcement and Removals Operations (“aka ICE Air, ‘the deportation machine’”). Working with the Texas A&M University School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic and the Cameroon Advocacy Network and privileged with white skin that allowed her to “cross borders with relative ease,” Towle shares her firsthand experiences at the U.S.-Mexican border, where she met freedom-seekers whose home countries spanned from Central America to Cameroon. The author’s observation that merely seeing and documenting the experiences of victims is a “subversive act” powerfully underscores the stories of mothers ripped away from their children, men detained indefinitely without due process during the Covid-19 pandemic that “turned prisons into death traps,” and asylum-seekers returned to the violent battlefields of war-torn countries.
A powerful exposé of the human costs of America’s immigration policies.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9781647425791
Page Count: 424
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Maher calls out idiocy wherever he sees it, with a comedic delivery that veers between a stiletto and a sledgehammer.
The comedian argues that the arts of moderation and common sense must be reinvigorated.
Some people are born snarky, some become snarky, and some have snarkiness thrust upon them. Judging from this book, Maher—host of HBO’s Real Time program and author of The New New Rules and When You Ride Alone, You Ride With bin Laden—is all three. As a comedian, he has a great deal of leeway to make fun of people in politics, and he often delivers hilarious swipes with a deadpan face. The author describes himself as a traditional liberal, with a disdain for Republicans (especially the MAGA variety) and a belief in free speech and personal freedom. He claims that he has stayed much the same for more than 20 years, while the left, he argues, has marched toward intolerance. He sees an addiction to extremism on both sides of the aisle, which fosters the belief that anyone who disagrees with you must be an enemy to be destroyed. However, Maher has always displayed his own streaks of extremism, and his scorched-earth takedowns eventually become problematic. The author has something nasty to say about everyone, it seems, and the sarcastic tone starts after more than 300 pages. As has been the case throughout his career, Maher is best taken in small doses. The book is worth reading for the author’s often spot-on skewering of inept politicians and celebrities, but it might be advisable to occasionally dip into it rather than read the whole thing in one sitting. Some parts of the text are hilarious, but others are merely insulting. Maher is undeniably talented, but some restraint would have produced a better book.
Maher calls out idiocy wherever he sees it, with a comedic delivery that veers between a stiletto and a sledgehammer.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781668051351
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sure to generate debate, and of special interest to adherents of free market capitalism.
A book-length assertion that capitalism’s woes can be traced to government interventionism.
Sharma, an investments manager, financial journalist, and author of The 10 Rules of Successful Nations, The Rise and Fall of Nations, and other books, opens with the case of his native India. The author argues that it should be in a better position in the global marketplace, possessing an entrepreneurial culture and endless human capital. The culprit was “India’s lingering attachment to a state that overpromises and under-delivers,” one that privileged social welfare over infrastructure development. Much the same is true in the U.S., where today “President Joe Biden is promising to fix the crises of capitalism by enlarging a government that never shrank.” Refreshingly, Sharma places just as much blame on Ronald Reagan for the swollen state that introduced distortions into the market. Moreover, “flaws that economists blame on ‘market failures,’ including wealth inequality and inordinate corporate power, often flow more from government excesses.” One distortion is the government’s bloated debt, as it continues to fund itself by borrowing in order to pay for “the perennial deficit.” As any household budget manager would tell you, debt is ultimately unsustainable. Wealth concentration is another outcome of government tinkering that has, whether by design or not, concentrated wealth into the hands of a very small number of people, “a critical symptom of capitalism gone wrong, both inefficient and grossly unfair.” Perhaps surprisingly, Sharma notes that in quasi-socialist economies such as the Scandinavian nations, such interventions are fewer and shallower, while autocratic command economies are doomed to fail. “[T]oday every large developed country is a full-fledged democracy,” he writes, and the more freedom the better—but that freedom, he argues, is undermined by the U.S. government, which has accrued “the widest budget deficit in the developed world.”
Sure to generate debate, and of special interest to adherents of free market capitalism.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781668008263
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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