A scientifically sophisticated, well-considered contribution to the literature of movement and environmental change.
Science journalist Shah looks at the biology and human ecology of migration, a topic overladen these days with all sorts of political shadings.
The child of Indian immigrants, Shah—author of the excellent and ever more timely book Pandemic (2016)—returns with an incisive examination of migration, which she considers a phenomenon both biological and cultural. Many bird species, for example, travel great distances in annual migrations, and a delicate butterfly species with which the author opens her narrative exhibits “a consistent pattern of movement across half of North America.” We have been taught to view such movement as potentially perilous: Invading species arrive, we think, and immediately disturb pristine ecosystems. Even Shah admits that “the idea of migration as a disruptive force has fueled my own work as a journalist.” Yet nothing could be more natural than animals moving in response to changes in environmental conditions. As the author shows, only a tiny fraction of relocated species displace others, an act that is consistent with Darwinian theories of natural selection. “Condemning newcomers as inevitably disruptive,” she writes, pointedly, “blames them for all transgressions committed by 1 percent or less of their members.” When it comes to humans, she writes, the topic becomes more fraught. In a time when humans are increasingly on the move, whether because of political or economic displacement or because their homes are becoming uninhabitable thanks to climate change, politicians such as Donald Trump are using the tiny number of problem-makers, real or potential, to keep the vast majority of law-abiding would-be citizens from making their homes in new lands. This ignores millennia of human movement from one place to the next. Even though “over the long history of life on earth, [migration’s] benefits have outweighed its costs,” nationalists still create xenophobic, incoherent policies, agreeing only that strangers are to be despised.
A scientifically sophisticated, well-considered contribution to the literature of movement and environmental change. (b/w maps)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-197-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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