The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers, by Zeke Hernandez

The Truth About Immigration was published in June of 2024, and therefore was quite timely and relevant when our group began reading it in late Fall of 2024 – finishing our discussion of it just after the second election of Donald Trump.

Having read it, the upside is that we all feel better educated about how immigration works in the United States, as well as its pros and cons. While it’s clear that the current archaic system needs to be updated, it is also clear that immigrants are a net positive to society for economic, social and cultural reasons.

The downside is that we’re likely to start seeing mass deportations anyway, due to Trump’s campaign promises, and we’ll be powerless to do anything about it. We are living in a time when fear of immigrants has been stoked to an all-time high for political gain.

If only everyone could read this book. We’d like to think it would make a difference, but who knows. Perhaps fear is just an easier sell.

One of the main takeaways is that both sides of the typical immigration debate are wrong, or at least short-sighted. One side claims that immigrants are a drain on society’s resources and dangerous to “our way of life.” The other side tends to counter by whispering the victim narrative, that taking in immigrants is the right thing to do because of the violence and oppression that causes people to flee their home countries. The truth is actually far more powerful than the victim narrative: Successful societies welcome newcomers. Unfortunately, that information is rarely part of the discussion. It takes more time to explain, and therefore is harder to break through.

Zeke Hernandez is very thorough in his presentation of the details, and although the book is heavy on facts, it is readable for the average American who has not experienced the immigration system first-hand. Another round of editing before publishing might have eliminated some repetition of ideas and made the information that much more digestible. His various stories and anecdotes, some from friends and others from his own experience as an immigrant from Uruguay, are a welcome illustration. We applaud his effort to enlighten readers with the truth.

— Julie Feirer

The Underneath, by Kathi Appelt

Kathi Appelt’s novel The Underneath (with illustrations by David Small) is a beautifully told story about pretty much everything all the time: life, death, love, hate, forgiveness, jealousy, generosity, cruelty, loyalty, betrayal, hope . . .

When the story opens, a mama cat and her two tiny, not-yet named kittens are in a bad way.

There is nothing lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned at the side of the road. A small calico cat. Her family, the one she lived with, has left her in this old and forgotten forest, this forest where the rain is soaking into her soft fur.

But mama cat soon finds a lonely, chained-up old hound, Ranger, who offers them hospitality in the “dark and holy Underneath,” where he is safe from the beatings of Gar Face. The cat family is safe there too. Cozy, even. Ranger names his kittens, immediately choosing Sabine (for the Sabine River) for the girl. And tentatively choosing Possum for the boy, then changing it to Puck when the boy, who has lots of puck, protests. Ranger sings his kittens to sleep every night. And Appelt’s lyrical writing makes us feel the preciousness of the odd little “found” family of cats and a dog.

But as in all good stories, something must go wrong. And because it’s in his nature, Puck leaves the safety of the dark and holy Underneath, and the scary, harrowing adventure begins: mama cat is drowned and Puck is left muddy, lost, and miserable on the wrong side of the river.

He isn’t alone on his journey back to Sabine and Ranger, which he had promised his mother. He walks with thousands of years of history, with old grudges and loves and wrongs and betrayals and friendships and alliances of the shape shifters and Grandmother Moccasin and the hundred-foot-long Alligator King. And, of course, Gar Face, the brutal man who is ultimately, and very appropriately, eaten by Alligator King at the end.

Appelt creates this narrative tapestry of trees and rivers and denizens of the bayou who bring thousands of years of love and loss and opinions and passions into Puck’s journey to find Ranger and Sabine. The outcome of the story rests not only on the bravery and love of Ranger and the kittens, but on the very personal choice Grandmother Moccasin makes after a thousand years of raging in a big clay pot, tangled in the roots of an ancient loblolly pine.

When she is finally freed, will Grandmother choose hate (and everybody dies) or love (and almost everybody lives)? Appelt keeps the reader wondering until the very last moment when Grandmother finally chooses love and frees Ranger from his rusty chain. And even that satisfying resolution is not really the end.

For trees, stories never end, they simply fold one into another. Where one begins to close, another begins to open, so that none are ever finished, not really. For Puck and Sabine and Ranger, this old story was the beginning of their new one.

                                                                        . . .

If you could ask the trees about them, the sweet gums and tupelos, the sycamore and oaks, oh, if only you cold decipher the dialects of tallow and chestnut and alder, they would tell you that here, in this lost piney woods, this forest that sits between the highways on the border of Texas and Louisiana, here among the deep paths and giant ferns, along the abandoned trails of the Caddo, here in this forest as old as the sky and sea, live a pair of silver twins and an old hound who sings the blues, right here . . .

Puck . . .

       Sabine . . .

                  . . . and Ranger.

                                                            Here.

A timeless and universal story, indeed.

One of the most interesting parts of our discussion of this novel was about whether it’s really a book for kids. (The publisher recommends it for ages ten and up.) Our conversation about suitability evolved from a semi-serious Maybe this book should actually be banned! to a But wait. No book should be banned. But maybe some books should be read only with adult helpers who can offer context. Or maybe it’s a matter or not every book being for every reader.

I fondly remember being a Godly Play storyteller for K-2 kids back in the day. One of the things I enjoyed most was the “wondering” questions at the end—particularly: “I wonder where you are in the story?” Most kids would usually find themselves somewhere. But occasionally, a child would shrug and say Nowhere. I’m not in that story.

I wish there were no children who could see themselves in The Underneath. But unfortunately, because of the way of the world, I imagine many can. I think of immigrants, refugees, kids from broken families, homeless kids, abused kids. Kids in foster care, kids in seemingly odd, atypical families, kids who have lost a parent or feel responsible for siblings. Kids whose parents are incarcerated. Those young readers may see themselves in Puck and Sabine’s story, and—in some sense—be at home even with the terrifying parts. And I think those readers may find hope and community in the dark and holy Underneath.

— Sharelle Moranville

Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein walks into a bathroom and overhears women condemning her for spreading conspiracy theories as one of the loudest voices in far-right media. The women ask “What’s happened to Naomi Klein? I used to like her.” Klein says nothing to the group—she’s heard it before, and she knows they’re not talking about her. They’ve confused her with the Other Naomi, her doppelganger, Naomi Wolf.

This is the start of Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, which tells the story of the two Naomis and unravels the many ways we have become such a broken society.

Klein and Wolf once shared the same political territory, critiquing how capitalism and the politicians it supports have sucked the meaning, energy, and money from our lives. Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism argues that those in power often exploit even our darkest moments—Hurricane Katrina, the invasion of Iraq— to derail democratic norms and increase profits. Her No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies argues that, in a corporate culture, we’re encouraged to express our individualism by creating personal brands that make us all alike, broke, and hollow.

Wolf’s The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women makes much the same argument—that corporations are getting rich exploiting women’s insecurities about how they should look. The result: women focus on external qualities at the expense of their professional success.

The two Naomis comfortably coexisted in the same sphere, often being confused with one another, but both headed the same direction.

But when Wolf became a voice of the anti-vax, anti-mask movement during Covid, Klein began to take notice. Wolf was using the same message she and Klein had once shared but was skewing it to reach far different conclusions. Klein saw the government and pharmaceutical companies reacting responsibly to help citizens survive Covid through security measures and vaccines. Wolf saw these same entities as the enemy, defying our individual freedoms by forcing us to mask and invading our bodies with vaccines. The feminist position advocating bodily autonomy was turned on its heels in defiance of vaccines. Klein began to feel she was living a parody. “It was an out-of-body experience,” she writes.

Klein had a doppelganger, a shadow self, and as she shows, doppelgangers are seldom good news. They are our evil twins, representing our dark side. And they have unique power against us. (Doppelganger is a German word meaning “double walker.”)

For a time, Klein didn’t know how to respond, because Wolf could use any evidence Klein provided to make conclusions that served her own contrary position. She planned an essay criticizing Bill Gates for taking a position during the pandemic that she felt robbed the needy of essential vaccines, but stopped herself because she realized Wolf could use this same argument to tie Gates to those she felt were denying us our freedoms.

Klein takes this premise, expands it, then peels it back, layer by layer by layer, to show that what has happened to her has happened to our entire country. The meanings of words has been turned upside down. Choice, once used to define a woman’s right to make her own health decisions, now is used to argue against masks. Politicians charge their opponents with immoral and unethical acts they themselves are committing, and their words are echoed enough that they take on their own reality. What are we to believe?

Klein asks: “Am I who I think I am or am I who others perceive me to be?”

Klein covers this mirror world through multiple iterations, including political protests, racism, eugenics, conspiracies, and political ideologies. She offers an intriguing analysis of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict written before the current war. The two sides are doppelgangers, she says. The same yet totally different. Which is the evil twin? Both and neither.

This is a complex, deeply researched and eye-opening view of our divided culture and how we got here. Klein concludes with a call to action and advises us to remain calm. Our current problems are hundreds of years in the making, she shows, and have flourished because of our sense of individualism, while our support of and reliance on community withers. The result is a tribal society in which we no longer trust members of other groups, our reflex being to disagree with them without listening to their very real concerns.

It’s a world in which conspiracy theorists like Wolf thrive until, perhaps, we use our words and call them what they are: weird.

This was nobody’s favorite book, including mine—and I recommended it. Some BBBers reread passages, trying to squeeze the meaning out of them; others skimmed entire sections, eyes crossing with mental fatigue; many never finished. Those who did finish agreed that the book’s final sections, Part Three and Part Four, are its strongest. And the Epilogue is well worth reading even if you skip the rest. 

— Pat Prijatel