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
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
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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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