Well-meaning but shallow, contributing little to our understanding of what’s happening on the southern border.
Journalism, visual art, poetry, and preaching to the choir meet in this primer of engagement in migration and border security.
“Poetry makes nothing happen,” observed W.H. Auden, sagely. Briante, a professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Arizona, acknowledges as much when, midway through this centrifugal exercise, she writes, “we do not need more poems at the port of entry any more than we need the concertina wire that now sparkles like tinsel through Nogales.” In what presumably is supposed to be prose poetry that occasional breaks out in a line or two of metered lyric, the author agitates for an activist poetry that does for detained migrants what Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” did for the besieged miners of Depression-era West Virginia: “And if I lay my white woman’s body on the border between Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora,” she writes, as if channeling Karen Finley or Marina Abramovic, “I do not become migrant although I might feel the pinch and pressure of cement under my hips, might smell how the concrete carries the odor of sun and piss.” Elsewhere she writes, with welcome self-awareness, “Dear documentarian, dear poet, what is the value of your privilege?” The suffering of others—of “The Other”—is the central trope in an intermittently sharp yet scattershot harangue against things ranging from “racist, misogynist and capitalist oppression” to the melting of polar ice and mass shootings. Those who enjoy this sort of thing will find this book invaluable. As for others—well, thanks to Luis Alberto Urrea, Kathryn Ferguson, Valeria Luiselli, Charles Bowden, and many other witnesses, there are dozens of books and authors to consult before this book, which contains nuggets of wisdom (too few and far between) but fails to cohere.
Well-meaning but shallow, contributing little to our understanding of what’s happening on the southern border.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-934819-90-6
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Noemi Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2020
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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