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
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
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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