A poignant, uncompromising addition to the growing literature on the plights of migrating asylum-seekers from Central...
A journalist and a historian gather 15 refugee stories that underscore a brewing humanitarian crisis.
Conducted between 2014 and 2018, these extensive interviews—by Mayers (English/City Coll. of San Francisco) and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Freedman (The Last Brazil of Benjamin East, 2015, etc.)—offer intimate portraits of the people currently fleeing horrendous violence in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Among other terrifying experiences, these first-person accounts (“solito, solita” means "alone, alone") tell of children witnessing the murders of their parents and grandparents because of their refusal to join gangs or provide the extortion money demanded by the gangs. These young people, often facing a lack of education and likely a life of crime, were sent away by relatives to often abusive coyotes at such an exorbitant cost that it has left them vulnerable and in debt for the rest of their lives. Some of the interviewees caught La Bestia, or the perilous freight trains in Mexico, where many perished along the way and others became “cyclical migrants” after repeated deportations. Even for the lucky few who made it to the United States, the immigration process was fraught and uncertain (even more so since the 2016 election). In the book’s helpful timeline, glossaries, and appendices, the editors give a sense of the historical context in Central America that has fed the current crisis since the 1930s: authoritarian regimes bolstered by American business and politics; gangs that formed in sanctuary cities like Los Angeles only to have their members deported to create havoc in the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador); and the changing, often restrictive immigration policies of the U.S. Thankfully, along with the seemingly countless heartbreaking details, the interviews tell of hopeful moments, too—of arrival to safety and the promise of work, school, and love. The editors also include a useful section entitled “Ten Things You Can Do.”
A poignant, uncompromising addition to the growing literature on the plights of migrating asylum-seekers from Central America.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60846-618-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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