Informative reading for activists and policymakers.
An immigration detention abolitionist explores the ties between America’s criminal justice and immigration systems.
For Shah, mass imprisonment and mass detention are two symptoms of the “American obsession with punishment and incarceration.” She traces the start of both to the explosive rise in prison building that began at the end of the 1980s and continued into the new millennium. Shah argues that the components underlying this trend—systemic racism, the failing war on drugs, and misguided national security concerns—carried over into sometimes brutal policies affecting immigrants and their status within American borders. Republican nativism was not entirely to blame for these developments, however. Bill Clinton "solidified the relationship between the criminal legal system and immigration enforcement system,” while Barack Obama focused on policies that criminalized and deported those immigrants deemed "unacceptable.” The connections thereby fostered between police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement culminated in Trump's inhumane family separation policy, as well as the increased moral panic about the threats represented by immigrants. Shah argues persuasively that this panic also led to increased prosecutions and detentions, especially for people coming from Central America. She further notes that some entities—most notably, private prisons—have profited handsomely from immigrant detention. As long as the demand for detention exists, so does the “need” to build more facilities, a situation Shah believes can only be ended by grassroots activism. At the same time, however, heightened awareness of police brutality brought about by the Black Lives Matter movement has helped spotlight how police and ICE collaborations have created dangerous situations for those immigrants made even more vulnerable by virtue of sex or gender identification. Shah’s intersectional approach to the immigrant justice struggle will interest those interested in immigration reform as well as individuals working on behalf of any marginalized community disproportionately affected by the current carceral system.
Informative reading for activists and policymakers.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9798888900840
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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