Critical in understanding today’s immigration issues.
A history of the struggle for immigration law reform in 20th-century America.
In this excellent debut, Yang—a deputy national editor at the New York Times who was part of a Washington Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the ties between Donald Trump and Russia—recounts the making of the historic Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which opened the door to Asian, Latin American, African, and Middle Eastern immigrants and “helped define America as a multicultural nation.” Until then, becoming an American was tied to European ancestry, with entry barred to nearly all Asians. In a lively, smoothly flowing narrative based on archival research, the author describes the “racial paranoia” of the 1920s, marked by the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan, the continued popularity of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, and the surge in eugenics. Anti-immigration sentiment led to a restrictive 1924 law, which deliberately cut immigration under quotas based on the number of foreign-born Americans in 1890. In ensuing decades, writes the author, restrictions continued, with concerns over communist infiltration by immigrants growing more important than the desire to control the race and nationality of Americans. By the 1950s, a “coalition of the powerful and powerless,” led by Congressman Emanuel Celler and including families of interned Japanese Americans, argued for immigration in the more conducive climate engendered by increasing celebration of the immigrant past, the scholarship of historian Oscar Handlin (The Uprooted), and politicians’ eagerness for urban ethnic votes. By then, even organized labor supported immigration. Throughout her important story, Yang highlights human and political drama, from the histrionics of racists to the political machinations of Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson on behalf of the displaced and others. The author also reveals the roles of unsung heroes like White House aide Mike Feldman, who shaped JFK’s message in A Nation of Immigrants. Yang illuminates the little-known, “transformative” 1965 law that spurred demographic changes expected to result in a nonwhite majority in America within a few decades.
Critical in understanding today’s immigration issues.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-393-63584-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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