Provocative and eye-opening work from a dedicated artist.
A distinguished poet details his experiences reporting from war zones and refugee camps and grappling with the limits of language.
In this essay collection, Sleigh (Creative Writing/Hunter Coll.; Station Zed: Poems, 2015, etc.) showcases 10 pieces—some previously published—each of which examines the impact of war and political struggle on individual experience. He divides the book into three untitled sections. The first includes pieces the author wrote while visiting war zones in the Middle East and Africa. In “The Deeds,” he discusses his interviews with Palestinians affected by the ongoing conflict with Israel and their efforts to carve out lives in neighboring Lebanon and Syria. The plight of Somali refugees in Kenya is the subject of another essay. Not only do many not know their rights; most live in conditions conducive only to starvation and hopelessness. In the second section of the book, Sleigh meditates on the work he does as a writer reporting on the human costs of conflict. He remarks that his driving passion is for “an art in which bodily reality isn’t slighted” and that also compels the artist to continue looking at “the surfaces of the world.” Analyzing work by poets Wilfred Owen, David Jones, and Anna Akhmatova, Sleigh refines this idea by emphasizing that the true artist is one who is “empirical rather than speculative.” In the final section of the book, the author explores the personal history that formed him. He writes about how surviving a marrow disease may have pushed him beyond the fear that could have impeded him from traveling to war zones and how coming into awareness of his well-meaning parents’ racism gave rise to his own desire to understand injustice. Sleigh also remembers his beloved friend Seamus Heaney, who saw poets as “stretched between politics and transcendence.” Wry and sharply observed, Sleigh’s book bears witness to injustice as it engages in a compelling, humane quest for artistic truth.
Provocative and eye-opening work from a dedicated artist.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55597-796-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
SEEN & HEARD
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