Book Reviews
Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload
By Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, Bloomsbury USA, New York, 2010, 203 pages
Review by Curt Prendergast
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CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, Yahoo News, Google News, your local newspaper, the blogosphere, the Huffington Post, Politico.com, Slate.com, (and the Sonoran Chronicle, of course). The list of news outlets seems endless.
Gone are the days of Walter Cronkite, the Big Three news networks, and your local paper. In the absence of a few trusted news outlets, the public now must sift through an “information overload.” Until fairly recently, journalists were the “gatekeepers,” the ones who decided if something was newsworthy. Journalists now “stand sentinel at a gate with no fence surrounding it.” Read rest of review
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The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West
By Patricia Nelson Limerick, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1987, 349 pages
Review by Curt Prendergast
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A recent headline on the front page of the Arizona Daily Star read “‘Invasion’ claim over SB 1070 shot down.” The state of Arizona had countersued the federal government over the partial blockage of an immigration enforcement law passed in April 2010. The central argument of the countersuit was that Arizona was being invaded by undocumented immigrants and the federal government should stop this invasion.
Inside the same newspaper, dated July 29, 2011, another headline read “Border security contract signed,” about a 3-year $24 million contract to maintain and repair the border fence in Arizona. Next to it was a headline that read “Huachuca general picked for 2nd star,” about the promotion of the head of Fort Huachuca, the largest military installation in southern Arizona. In the Nation section of the newspaper, a headline read “Polygamist-case prosecutor promises audio recording,” about a Mormon who was on trial for allegedly raping two girls, aged 12 and 15, with whom he had “spiritual or celestial marriages.” Read rest of review
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The Law Into Their Own Hands: Immigration and the Politics of Exceptionalism
By Roxanne Lynn Doty, University of Arizona Press, 2009, 160 pages
Review by Curt Prendergast
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Arizona has become the “epicenter of anti-immigrantism,” wrote Roxanne Lynn Doty in her book on the rise of border vigilantism and the increasingly stringent immigration enforcement measures appearing across the United States. She begins with an insider’s view of the Minuteman Project and takes the reader through the complex web of activists, politicians, academics, pundits, talk radio hosts, and think tanks that back the new “attrition through enforcement” strategy. Arizonans may recognize this strategy from last year’s Senate Bill 1070.
Through interviews with members of the Minuteman Project, analysis of news stories, and data gathered from polls and academic sources, Doty places this new strategy in the context of the politics of exceptionalism. She defines exceptionalism as “those political situations in which individuals and groups are turned into an exception by the exercise of sovereign power, resulting in their exclusion from basic rights guaranteed by the law or the constitution.” Read rest of review
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Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol
By Kelly Lytle Hernandez, University of California Press, 2010, 284 pages
Review by Curt Prendergast
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In one of the few books to profile the institution of the U.S. Border Patrol, Kelly Lytle Hernandez provides a much-needed narrative of one of the most influential organizations in the national immigration debate.
The foundation of Hernandez’s book is archival research at the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Border Patrol Museum, and the Mexican Department of Migration. Through this research she was able to bring the voices of Border Patrol agents since the 1920s into the current debate on immigration. Read rest of review
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Imperial
by William T. Vollman, 1200 pages, $35.00.
Review by Paul Ingram
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Vollman once referred to the gargantuan “Imperial” as his Moby Dick and while some have called the nearly 1200-page tome nearly perverse for appearing as a massive chunk of notes and indiscriminate ideas, the book’s singular focus on the single California county tells a widening story of the madness of the 20th century, a history of environmental transformation and racially-driven violence.
It’s a feverish work that begins with the story of the New River, the polluted river Styx that winds through the desert and throughout the long history of US – Mexico relations, with Imperial county as the stage. The first environmental catastrophe of the county was the Salton Sea, the result of engineers who chewed into the Colorado River for irrigation canals and wound up creating the acrid Salton Sea. For a moment, this sudden lake was full of resorts, but the lake has decayed over the century, becoming a salty, drying wasteland that stinks of dead fish and salt-marshes. The boosterism of early California gave way to the realities of the state’s shortsighted maneuvers, and Vollman tells this story with photographs, history, and a personal style that winds these together remarkably well. Read rest of review
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The Southwest in American Literature and Art: The Rise of a Desert Aesthetic
By David W. Teague, The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ, 1997
Review by Curtis Prendergast
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The author takes the reader from the time when the Southwest was viewed as a barren wild to the present, in which the landscape of the Southwest is appreciated both for its economic benefits and for its sublime beauty.
In the words of its author, David W. Teague, this book “is a study of various imaginative representations of the desert in the United States.” It describes the evolution of the aesthetic relationship between humans and the desert of the Southwest, particularly in the context of the large-scale migration of Anglo-Americans to the Southwest in the late 19th century. For Teague the deserts of the Southwest, ”represent as much an ideological as a geographical construct.” These ideological constructs are the focus of his study. Read rest of review
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