Sharp, provocative, timely reading.
An Austin-based journalist and immigrant activist interweaves narratives of two refugees with a history of modern American refugee resettlement policies.
World War II transformed the United States into a global leader in refugee resettlement. However, as former Catapult columnist Goudeau shows in her moving debut, the American dream has since become out of reach—both within and without U.S. borders—to immigrant asylum-seekers. Drawing on extensive interviews with two refugees she helped to resettle as well as historical research, the author draws attention to a resettlement problem that has reached crisis proportions. She centers the narrative on two women: Mu Naw, a member of a persecuted minority in Myanmar, and Hasna, a refugee from the Syrian civil war. Both were granted a chance to resettle in the U.S. in the first and second decades, respectively, of the 21st century, a time when the number of refugees globally had reached all-time highs but the number of refugees offered resettlement in the U.S. had reached historic lows. Yet because Mu Naw was Christian and Hasna was Muslim, the two had distinctly different experiences. Mu Naw faced the inevitable discrimination that came with immigrant status. Nevertheless, many white Americans offered the social and financial support that allowed her and her family to leave poverty behind and become middle class within the span of a decade. Hasna, who arrived in the U.S. just a few months before the election of Donald Trump in 2016, found herself facing a far more hostile atmosphere and uncertain future. Most of the people who helped her and her family were Syrian American. When American travel bans against Muslims, including Syrian refugees, went into effect in 2017, her hopes of reuniting the members of her war-fractured family faded. In a detailed text that moves smoothly around in time, Goudeau effectively humanizes the worldwide refugee crisis while calling much-needed attention to a badly broken American immigration system.
Sharp, provocative, timely reading.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-55913-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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