THE SOCIALIST MANIFESTO: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality, never more trenchant than today

THE SOCIALIST MANIFESTO: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
BHASKAR SUNKARA
Basic Books
$15.00 trade paper, purchased from the author's magazine website

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A "razor-sharp" introduction to this political and economic ideology makes a galvanizing argument for modern socialism (Naomi Klein)—and explains how its core tenets could effect positive change in America and worldwide.

In The Socialist Manifesto, Bhaskar Sunkara explores socialism's history since the mid-1800s and presents a realistic vision for its future. With the stunning popularity of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Americans are embracing the class politics of socialism. But what, exactly, is socialism? And what would a socialist system in America look like?

The editor of Jacobin magazine, Sunkara shows that socialism, though often seen primarily as an economic system, in fact offers the means to fight all forms of oppression, including racism and sexism. The ultimate goal is not Soviet-style planning, but to win rights to healthcare, education, and housing, and to create new democratic institutions in workplaces and communities. A primer on socialism for the 21st century, this is a book for anyone seeking an end to the vast inequities of our age.

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My Review: William M. Tweed said this about the way the US does politics:

I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating. As quoted in Understanding American Government (2003) by Susan Welch, p. 224

No good came from trying to talk sense into the Democratic Party; their loss on 5 November 2024 was catastrophic. It was not the resounding mandate the Nerd Reich and its tech scum boosters portray it as. The margin was not huge, but the impact will be *immense*, far-reaching, and vastly immiserating for millions.

It did not need to happen, even in the teeth of forty years of the carefully disguised radical coup orchestrated by the wealthy and powerful against the rest of us. The way to beat the radicals is not to appease or identify with them; it is to present an alternative to them.

This will never happen in the two-party system.

I wanted this not to be true, but this idiotic result has driven the last nail in the coffin of my faith in humanity, my trust in the US institutions of politics, and my desire to support the least-worst politicians in hopes they'll do some of the Right Thing. They won't.

Now what?

Now this, and before someone says "But socialism!" or even stupider "that's Communist!" I'll remind all y'all that the monster you've been Pavlovianly conditioned to fear and hate is totalitarianism relabeled to scare you away from realizing the socialist demands the owners hate were already met...to a degree...and they're the exact things your newly elected scum were put in place to destroy. When the way you live gets worse, do not open your yap. You either voted for, or decided not to vote against, this exact result.

It is your fault.

Now let's figure out what we can begin to do to make a few gains. Start by reading Bhaskar Sunkara's clear, cogent, carefully reasoned manifesto. If you're still reeling from the evidence of how immensely successful the scumbags' propaganda, misinformation, and misdirection were, here's a shred of hope to cling to. Here's a possibility that you already know works...you who receive "benefits" aka your own tax money returned to you (not some gift as the radical right wants you to believe) better than anyone...so lean into it.

Don't feel like you can do anything, don't want to think about it, are just too drained to give it your attention? That's their system for making you passive at work. If you won't do the work, spend your money to support those who will, and that shit-sure ain't the Democrats.

Support a real change for the better. Read this book to learn what that can mean.

PONY CONFIDENTIAL, urban-fantasy talking animal story meets cozy mystery

PONY CONFIDENTIAL
CHRISTINA LYNCH
Berkley Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In this one-of-a-kind mystery with heart and humor, a hilariously grumpy pony must save the only human he’s ever loved after discovering she stands accused of a murder he knows she didn’t commit.

Pony has been passed from owner to owner for longer than he can remember. Fed up, he busts out and goes on a cross-country mission to reunite with the only little girl he ever loved, Penny, who he was separated from and hasn’t seen in years.

Penny, now an adult, is living an ordinary life when she gets a knock on her door and finds herself in handcuffs, accused of murder and whisked back to the place she grew up. Her only comfort when the past comes back to haunt her are the memories of her precious, rebellious pony.

Hearing of Penny’s fate, Pony knows that Penny is no murderer. So, as smart and devious as he is cute, the pony must use his hard-won knowledge of human weakness and cruelty to try to clear Penny’s name and find the real killer.

This acutely observant feel-good mystery reveals the humanity of animals and beastliness of humans in a rollicking escapade of epic proportions.

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My Review: You know that Swede who writes about cutesy old people? Of course you do, y'all luuuv him as much as Richard Osman! (Only Osman's old people are cool, unlike that Swede's faux-feisty feebs.) Now imagine that Swede decided to take over Spencer Quinn's Chet and Bernie series.

Yeah. That, and Remarkably Bright Creatures chucked in for good measure. So what's it doing as a regular review, not a Burgoine? "When you like a book, but don't love it, it's a Burgoine," someone is even now saying to their screen.

Penny and fluent English-hearer Pony the pony, separately and together, do some very good mental health work, that's why it's a regular review, and thanks for noticing. Penny's never quite gotten a grip on Life; as a result she is always on the back foot with the people and situations in her life. Being a kindergatren teacher does not make this easier. Being a single mom to a cute kid with a really bad relationship to the father, well...gettin' the drift here? She has a life-altering nightmare hit her square in the chops, and here we come to the first-ever in my reviews spoiler. (Stop laughing! And pointing is rude.)

This para has the spoiler: When Penny was twelve, a terrible, fatal accident occurred and her family has to run away. Pony got left behind, and is still bitter about it. Penny's now being accused of murder, twenty years later, and is hauled off to jail. A mother with a child is hauled off to jail for suspicion of involvement in a twenty-year-old crime.

This is really, really unbelievable to me.

Howsomever, the plot needs driving so drive we shall. Grouchy, misanthropic Pony hears and understands this, decides he's off to save Penny (the one human he's ever loved) and has so many cool adventures...all of 'em opportunitites to shine a light onto how truly unfair and sadistically convoluted late-stage capitalism is. I agree with this and find the looneyness of the animal characters' various voices great fun. They banter together, discuss how rotten humans are. They still say home truths about each other that will get past the guard of all but the most cynical. I'll go with it.

I want to note that suicide and depression are more than minor plot points without being foregrounded.

As a puzzle, the villains are very two-dimensional thus easy to spot. I read a lot of mysteries, though, so ma'at leads my eyes (as the Egyptians said) and I figured it out; honestly, that's not the point here. Read this for feel-good cuteness. Read this for affirmation the world *can* be good. Read this, in short, for fun.

I did. It was. Everybody's happy. (Even Pony.)

YOKE OF STARS, another concentrated dose of Lemberg's amazing Birdverse

YOKE OF STARS
R. B. LEMBERG
Tachyon Publications
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In the School of Assassins, Stone Orphan waits for a first assignment. After their first kill, they will graduate, and attain the coveted cloth of bone. But instead of a commission, Stone Orphan gets an inquisitive linguist, Ulín. By turns, Stone Orphan and Ulín narrate tales of love, suffering, exile, and self-determination, and two wounded souls try to find hope in each other through the radical act of listening.

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My Review: A storyverse like Lemberg's is not going to be for everyone. A person who can write this is not from the US and not on the gender binary and not wired like the usual drudge/drone in that they aren't very interested in the Overculture and its concerns. No one who was could've written this: "A story moves back and forth in translation, and it is remade every time. Each of us is a story translated to a language vastly different from its first. You can try to translate yourself back, but it won't be the same story."

This is not the thought, the distilled realization, of a person who lives in one language, or one who simply waits to talk again. There's a radical act of vulnerability in listening to what is actually said to you, not simply responding to how whatever is heard makes you feel. Life is not therapy. Author Lemberg lives in that reality.

The Birdverse is multiple tales old now. In accordance with my long-standing policy of not reviewing books I've spent my own United States dollars on, I have not reviewed earlier ones. I'm pretty sure that you can pick this book up and derive a delicious reading experience from its lush, limpid prose with no further background than is provided in the book. That is not to say it will be a doddle. You're wise not to think visually *first* in the Birdverse. There's a reason one main character here is a linguist.... I loved reading it because I am comforted by the Birdverse and its unremarked queerness and prevalence of spectrums. I think those things are background at this point but I also think someone whose first foray into it is this book might disagree with me (this explains the absence of the fifth star). I'm sad to say that is really not very important to me. I think the point of reading is to broaden horizons, to shape and sculpt and prune the thoughts in one's head. Books like the Birdverse ones are going to make themselves at home in spaces you yourself did not realize were there, or fit themselves onto and around ideas you are growing.

Not always comfortable but almost always very healthy for your worldview. I'm sure this book, light on the more troubling things I've heard others describe in Author Lemberg's œuvre as negatives in their reads, is short enough to make your reading pleasant as well as mind-expanding. These people are struggling through barriers we all recognize between ourselves and others. The overcoming of traumas, or not, is a constant. The manner these obstacles are illuminated in the story is enough to cause me to urge the read on you as soon as you can get it.

I don't imagine a lot of cishet people really think about gender othering. It's not asked of you very often. Try it here: Whenever an assumption made in the story brings you up short, don't dismiss it or snort past it; think, "how is my world this frustrating or confusing or nonsensical to another person?" It can open broad vistas. That can only be a good thing for you, and those around you.

At the end of the day, a read gives you what you reach for within it. I got the certainty that I'm not insane, I'm trying to translate from my own inner worldtongue into a different one, spoken by people who care very little for the nuances I love and live for.

And you?

ALL'S FAIR IN LOVE AND TREACHERY, Regency-era mystery twofer with satisfying conclusions

ALL'S FAIR IN LOVE AND TREACHERY
CELESTE CONNALLY
Minotaur Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Bridgerton meets Agatha Christie in this dazzling next installment in a captivating Regency-era mystery series with a feminist spin.

21 June, 1815. London may be cheering the news of Napoleon’s surrender at Waterloo, but Lady Petra Forsyth has little to celebrate after discovering that the death of her viscount fiancé three years earlier was no accident. Instead, it was murder, and the man responsible is her handsome, half-Scottish secret paramour Duncan Shawcross—yet the scoundrel has disappeared, leaving only a confusing riddle about long-forgotten memories in his wake.

So what’s a lady to do when she can’t hunt down her traitorous lover? She concentrates on a royal assignment instead. Queen Charlotte has tasked Petra with attending an event at the Asylum for Female Orphans and making inquiries surrounding the death of the orphanage’s matron. What’s more, there may be a link between the matron’s death and a group of radicals with ties to the aristocracy, as evidenced by an intercepted letter. Then, Petra overhears a nefarious conversation with two other men about a plot to topple the monarchy, set to take place during three days of celebrations currently gripping London. As the clock counts down and London’s streets teem with revelers, Petra’s nerves are fraying as her past and present collide. Yet while all’s fair in love and war, she can never surrender, especially when more orphaned girls may be in trouble. And to save their lives, the monarchy itself, and even her own heart, Lady Petra must face her fears with the strength of an army of soldiers and fight with the heart of a queen.

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My Review: Heavy hitters, those comps. Aim high, editors and marketers, we can all use some top-flight relief from reality.

If you, like me, haven't read book one (Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Lord), I think you'll be okay starting here. Lady Petra is a solid character whose relationship to the world she inhabits is established; none of the frequent, and to me off-putting, Regency trope of "marriage or bust" that all the Bridgerton books reinforce so very fully. It's been a long time since the best Regency writer of all time, Georgette Heyer, poured her champagne prose into the flutes that served my readerly soul. Author Connally does not sit that high in my writers' tier list. To be fair, there are almost no other writers that high in my estimation, in genre or out. This unpleasant trope is present in Heyer's writing but is borne up from the yeasty sludge of my twenty-first centurion's disapproval by the prose it's crafted in.

The comparison to Dame Agatha is apt. The puzzle to be solved here had faint echoes of Death in the Clouds, one of her strange 1930s Poirots. If you've read it, you know what the thrust of this book will be. The preservation and/or restoration of Ma'at is the matter of all mysteries, so the ultimate resolution of the story is a foregone conclusion. Which mystery requiring Lady Petra's attention, personal or "professional," will be the one that knits a rent in the social fabric?

The accustomed repurposing of class-based access and modern storytelling's need for a female character to have agency unthinkable in the time period of the story is done deftly here. In part this is due to Lady Petra's age and status as a not-quite widow, but still suitably linked to a male authority figure that it needn't be discussed or thought about...a dead-in-the-war fiancé is a useful device in this world. Her current love interest can be elided from public suspicion because he knew her in childhood, so their connection can be acceptably explained away without the need to resort to scandal. As he is both absent in flesh and central in fact to the submystery in the book, this is a fact much traded on.

Any book set in historical times has a hurdle to leap in the way it handles the realities of its time period versus the narrative needs of a twenty-first century novel. Lady Petra lusts after Duncan, who's hunkiness is permaybehaps over-established, but in private, as would be the case for women of the era who are not Lady Caroline Lamb. Lady Petra's freedom to act due to her distant connection to Queen Charlotte feels a bit overly modern but needs must when the plot-devils drive.

They drive hard in here, with a lot of characters doing a lot of things they oughtn't to do. The ideas of the story are complex, possibly convoluted, and center on the way the world is changing due to the recently-completed Napoleonic wars that have organized English society for decades. At war's end, there is little appetite for going back to the way things were for anyone disadvantaged in that earlier day. The cork's out of the bottle. Now how does society change?

Lady Petra and her fellows are figuring it out. There is a lot of upheaval to come, as history tells us, but this book is set when the shapes of the upheavers are still shadowy. The change that is inevitable in any highly unequal society is as yet unformed but its energy is very much present in every detail Lady Petra uncovers on the Queen's errand. It was fun piecing together the next few years from what happens in the story's present...a big reason I enjoy the historical-mystery genrw when it's well done. Plus: doggos!

I needed this kind of escape now. If you're in need of a series that makes story-sense, and is in hailing distance of historical sense, here's you a choice worthy of your time and treasure.

THE VILLAIN'S DANCE, apt title for this cautionary tale of the societal chaos of civil war

THE VILLAIN'S DANCE
FISTON MWANZA MUJILA (tr. Roland Glasser)
Deep Vellum (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Following the international success of his debut novel Tram 83, Fiston Mwanza Mujila is back with his highly anticipated second novel, which follows a remarkable series of characters during the Mobutu regime.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, otherwise known as Congo-Kinshasa or DRCongo, has had a series of names since its founding. The name of Zaire best corresponds to the experience of the novel’s characters. The years of Mobutu’s regime were filled with utopias, dreams, fantasies and other uncontrolled desires for social redemption, the quest for easy enrichment and the desecration of places of power.

Among these Zairians’ immigration to Angola during the civil war boycotting the borders inherited from colonization, as if the country did not have its own diamonds, and the occupation of public places by children from outside. The author creates the atmosphere of the time through a roundup of the diviner Tshiamuena, also known as Madonna of the Cafunfo mines, prides herself of being God with whoever is willing to listen to her. Franz Baumgartner, an apprentice writer originally from Austria and rumba lover, goes around the bars in search of material for his novel. Sanza, Le Blanc and other street children share information to the intelligence services when they are not living off begging and robbery. Djibril, taxi driver, only lives for reggae music.

As soon as night falls, each character dances and plays his own role in a country mined by dictatorship.

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My Review: Want to know how much I appreciate Author Fiston Mwanza Mujila's talents?

I didn't pan, belittle, or insult his poetry. All y'all know how I feel about poetry. And I gave it more than three stars! Be amazed, be impressed...I hope you'll be inspired to go get one. Tram 83 worked for me, as well; I know a lot of folks were't fans but it felt like a breeze from Africa to me, hot, wet, heavily freighted. This impression left me for dead in the first instance; I was less enrapt with its story and atmosphere then than I am in retrospect. In part that's down to my subsequent experience of reading The Villain's Dance.

In common with my earlier reads of the author's books, I began this one with an awareness of atmosphere. He is always, or so it feels to me, careful to begin as he means to go on. I'm reasonably sure the huge majority of my readers are unaware of Mobutu's identity, and are more or less uninformed about tthe name "Zaire" and its history...many in my generation will have known the name Zaire vaguely applies to a huge place near the Congo River but be blissfully unaware that the name is no longer used, or why that happened.

I think that gives the novel almost an SFnal appeal. There's little sense of geography encompassing the story in US readers, so why not just go all the way and market it as taking place on a different planet entirely? *I* can do this, I'm a book reviewer, the publisher can't. The level of outrage engendered would be epic. However, let me propose this to you: If you're willing to learn the names of made-up places like Middle Earth, Arrakis, Pern, Atlantis, Downbelow Station, and their different inhabitants, conflicts, social norms, what's the hold up on Zaire and Brazzaville?

Maybe the tiniest taint of racism? Worth some energy to think about.

Assuming you're in the already-overcame-it or the overcoming-it-now group, this story's got great conflicts between dark-grey, pitch-black, and palest shades of violet people trying their best to make it in a world where up and down just switched places...like being on a space station whose spin just changed speeds dramatically.

Maybe my increased appreciation for this read makes more sense than I thought it did at first.

The people in this book aren't just as well-realized as the setting, for the most part; see below. The pace of the story is provided by history, as it's based on the realities then prevailing. The entire enterprise of nation-building collapsing into civil war (by definition a chaotic break in the life of a society) honestly needs little of that tarting up to make it compelling, even riveting, reading. What Author Fiston does very well here is to fragment the locations of the chaos to give different people reason to speak their truth without losing the core purpose of telling us this story. Like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, we are taken into realms of deep desperation and left there long enough to get it; then we're offered a peek into the purpose of the extraction and the exploitation that requires...we're not left to wallow, the way The Octopus, f/ex, does with us in service of the same sharp criticism of the cutting edge of capitalism. Poe said it very succinctly in the nineteenth century:  "{C}orporations, it is very well known, have neither posteriors to be kicked, nor souls to be damned." (Thanks for showing me the accurate quote again, P-E!)

Edges, as noted above, cut; in this story we're in the path of the blade so see both the wielding and cutting inherent in its very existence. People fail. It is inevitable. Challenges go unmet still less mastered. As often as not that is a design feature of the challenge. It engenders judgment and contempt for failure, but leaves the challenge, well, unchallenged. I suspect the true-to-life experience of people showing up for a minute then vanishing will affront a lot of complacently smug story-structure addicts. It's not by accident, y'all; it's a feature not a bug. Like life in an unstable place at a volatile time, different people will come, only to go without fanfare, or even explanation. Most of the characters trying to make it any old how they can haven't got the wherewithal to care, often enough to notice, who is who except at the precise flash of the camera that "now" represents.

I am trying as best I can to explain away the most common issues I've seen raised in others's assessments of the book. I'm not sure it matters. I hope y'all will attend to my 4.5* rating more closely than to my blandishments. A book of this trenchance is not to be dismissed. I'm hopeful that a few will take this moment of US culture shock to see what has happened in other places at this kind of inflection point.

Forewarned is forearmed.

SLEEPING WORLDS HAVE NO MEMORY, thought-provoking story with a hopeful twist

SLEEPING WORLDS HAVE NO MEMORY
YAROSLAV BARSUKOV
CAEZIK SF & Fantasy (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: When lies become truths and two kingdoms head to a bloody war, a man is exiled for his conscience

Refusing the queen’s order to gas a crowd of protesters, Minister Shea Ashcroft is banished to the border to oversee construction of the biggest defensive tower in history. However, the use of advanced technology taken from refugees makes the tower volatile and dangerous, becoming a threat to local interests. Shea has no choice but to fight the local hierarchy to ensure the construction succeeds—and to reclaim his own life.

Surviving an assassination attempt, Shea confronts his inner demons, encounters an ancient legend, and discovers a portal to a dead world—all the while struggling to stay true to his own principles and maintain his sanity. Fighting memories and hallucinations, he starts to question everything...

Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory is a thought-provoking meditation on the fragility of the human condition, our beliefs, the manipulation of propaganda for political gains, and our ability to distinguish the real from the unreal and willingness to accept convenient “truths.” The novel is a compelling exploration of memory, its fragile nature, and its profound impact on our perception of identity, relationships, and facts themselves.

A unique blend of science fiction, fantasy and noir, with zeitgeist and prophetic qualities (the original novella anticipated the Russo-Ukrainian War), this is a must for fans of China Miéville’s Bas-Lag series, Ted Chiang’s Tower of Babylon, and Robert Silverberg’s Tower of Glass.

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My Review: We can use some entertainment. We can use a bit of moral instruction, it seems. Author Barsukov said these things to himself, at least in my reconstruction of the thought process that led to this book, and decided that he'd make a world and a man to resist its slide into darkness.

I found this book very inspiring. I'm inspired to bring it to y'all's attention because of this piece from The Guardian, "'It will renew your faith in humanity': books to bring comfort in dark times":

A surprising number of readers believe a happy ending should mean automatic disqualification from any serious literary award. Good luck to them: I wish them joy in their wallowing. In my turn, I’ve come to believe the opposite. To reach only for novels that reaffirm our darkest fears is merely to make an escape of a different sort, not the escapism of brooding heroes and wedding finales, but the security blanket of an equally foregone conclusion: the safety of imagining the worst. I would argue that to live only in that place is simply cowardice in better camouflage. The truth is that it’s far riskier to remain in uncertainty. Far braver, far more radical to keep hoping.

The truth of this is in Shea's dogged determination to do what's Right; it's in his determination's effect on engineer Brielle, whose expertise is central in what their shared need to do what's Right creates.

There's a lot of the epic fantasy ethos in this urban-fantasy story, sans the usual military glorification; but there is a very welcome leavening of SF in the story that prevents me from the usual somnolent, glazed-eyed scanning to get to the ending. I was alert and involved as Brielle's skills were deployed to create the tower that Shea's tasked with defending, to little avail:

The tower took the length of the world—only it was an alien world, replicating itself over and over as it climbed to a distant, ghostly gap into the clouds. Or did he stare down a well? Shea's head spun again as up and down flip-flopped like axes on a gyroscope.

Does this dimensionally daft structure need defending? Does this technology need help, or resistance to its implications? Can anyone, still less a proven-murderous tyrant, be trusted with a tool/weapon of this magnitude? Are the Others, the aliens, to be trusted, or are they there to treat Shea and his people as the Others...with the usual result?

Ethical questions, existential ones, that resonate clearly with our post-November 6th world. They aren't easy, or easily solved ones; Author Barsukov doesn't pretend his ending is a solution to them all. There aren't any escape routes from the consequences of greed and lust for power provided. There are stern meditations on what we try to use, though:

What makes guilt so grotesque is the fact that it adorns itself with whatever remains of our righteousness.

And so the sadness of life as a moral actor, as a being with agency and puissance outreaching the lessons of their past, is revealed and refined. The story, an expansion of his 2021 novella Tower of Mud and Straw, reminded me more and more of THE DEEP SEA DIVER'S SYNDROME (qv) which French translation also delves into the intersection between dreamlike states and meatspace with equal care. Does anyone really know what the Tower is/can do? Do their...reveries, memories, dreamlike experiences...come without cost yet replete with warning signs?

An ending that addresses these queries of reality yet doesn't wrap them in a tight, constricting little bow gave me both inspiration and information to examine this moment in which I am deeply unhappy, afraid, and emotionally bereft, with a dose of hope. There is a reason Author Barsukov chose this particular stream-of-consciousness style, and this superposed urban-fantasy/SF genre mashup, to tell you this story. Intrinsic to the story, the way everything meshes...and the things that don't...are all made to present a frame for a very intensely resonant meditation.

There is not a lot more valuable for a story to give as its gift than that.

THE TRUTH ABOUT IMMIGRATION: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers, careful, honest, trenchant and tendentious

THE TRUTH ABOUT IMMIGRATION: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers
ZEKE HERNANDEZ
St. Martin's Press
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The go-to book on immigration: fact-based, comprehensive, and nonpartisan.

Immigration is one of the most controversial topics in the United States and everywhere else. Pundits, politicians, and the public usually depict immigrants as either villains or victims. The villain narrative is that immigrants pose a threat—to our economy because they steal our jobs; our way of life because they change our culture; and to our safety and laws because of their criminality. The victim argument tells us that immigrants are needy outsiders—the poor, huddled masses whom we must help at our own cost if necessary. But the data clearly debunks both narratives. From jobs, investment, and innovation to cultural vitality and national security, more immigration has an overwhelmingly positive impact on everything that makes a society successful.

In The Truth About Immigration, Wharton professor Zeke Hernandez draws from nearly 20 years of research to answer all the big questions about immigration. He combines moving personal stories with rigorous research to offer an accessible, apolitical, and evidence-based look at how newcomers affect our local communities and our nation. You'll learn about the overlooked impact of immigrants on investment and job creation; realize how much we take for granted the novel technologies, products, and businesses newcomers create; get the facts straight about perennial concerns like jobs, crime, and undocumented immigrants; and gain new perspectives on misunderstood issues such as the border, taxes, and assimilation.

Most books making a case for immigration tell you that immigration is good for immigrants. This book is all about how newcomers benefit you, your community, and your country. Skeptics fear that newcomers compete economically with locals because of their similarities and fail to socially assimilate because of their differences. You'll see that it's exactly the opposite: newcomers bring enduring economic benefits because of their differences and contribute positively to society because of their similarities. Destined to become the go-to book on one of the most important issues of our time, this book turns fear into hope by proving a simple truth: immigrants are essential for economically prosperous and socially vibrant nations.

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My Review: Do you like to eat? Thank an immigrant, an economic migrant, as you chow down on those tomatoes and cucumbers.

*You* sure didn't go pick 'em.

Do you use Google, chat on Twitter, watch TikTok every day? Thank an immigrant. In this case, you're thanking said immigrant with your data being harvested to fatten his (they're all men, at least so far) coffers.

But that law'n'order fetish you got goin' on...surely that's the real reason to oppose immigration, to keep 'em out and chuck 'em out when they come anyway, right? The president-elect has more felonies on his record than a random immigrant. But they cost us money! Take money from needy Murrikinz! You're thinking of the GOP in the various legislatures. Immigrants pay taxes through their (upright & honest, or shady) employers. They're barred by law from getting any of those taxes back.

The author, unlike me, is apolitical. He has done the research and these are the facts he found. If you support immigration, read this book for talking points. There's a lot of 'em. If you don't support immigration, why the hell are you reading my reviews? If someone you care for is anti-immigrant, maybe this non-partisan voice will reach them. It sure can't hurt to try.

I'm not calm enough to care to engage with people like that. They're wrong. I needn't fuss about it because that kind of wrong loves a fight. Got nothin' left for that uselessness. If you do, great! And here's you a swiss army knife of evidence-backed facts to use in your noble work of Enlightenment.