A well-written look at how immigration works on an individual level.
An immigration lawyer shares client stories.
In this debut nonfiction book, Cohen relates the tales of several of the people she represented as an immigration attorney at a leading law firm, some paying clients and others pro bono. The stories reveal a range of experiences, from refugees seeking political asylum to middle-class professionals immigrating by choice. Several of the author’s clients qualified for “extraordinary ability” status, including an Albanian writer, an Asian violinist, and a Honduran school principal, while others followed more mundane paths, which Cohen still depicts in detail, showing each individual’s merit. The case studies also examine the complicated and often bureaucratic process of establishing legal status, permanent residency, and citizenship, revealing how a single sympathetic or disdainful immigration officer can determine a person’s fate. Although the epilogue offers some suggestions for activism and a broader look at immigration rules, the book approaches the issue from the perspective of individual cases rather than policy, an effective method of addressing a complex and often emotional topic. The author’s personal interest in and respect for all her clients is evident (“I felt fiercely protective of him, a feeling I have about all my clients who face life-altering consequences if their cases fail,” she explains at one point), making it easy for readers to connect with each case she profiles. Throughout her book, written with Taylor, Cohen reminds readers that her position at a major law firm allowed her clients access to more connections and influence than most people have. The concluding pages suggest ways in which the immigration process can be made more equitable. The writing is strong, and readers of legal dramas will enjoy the tales of racing to courthouses, developing winning strategies, and waiting for verdicts. Readers who are unfamiliar with immigration law will find the volume extremely informative without being overly technical, while those with knowledge of the process will not consider it too simple. The focus on the clients’ experiences makes the book broadly appealing.
A well-written look at how immigration works on an individual level.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63299-487-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: River Grove Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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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