Francisco Cant\u00fa has written a book that’s part anthropological field work, part journalism, part memoir, part disputation, and part vision quest.\u00a0 That description sounds like a recipe for a patchwork of artifice, but Cant\u00fa has constructed a work that is much more difficult to describe than it is to understand.\u00a0 It can be difficult to read, of course;\u00a0 people are risking their lives in this world every day.<\/p>\n
His topics, the southern US border, the policies around crossing it, and the Border Patrol that is the first point of enforcing them, are themselves a patchwork of emotion, history, and ideas.\u00a0 People feel and think strongly about them and often they have no coherent way to express them in toto.\u00a0 Cant\u00fa’s multi-faceted approach both illuminates the topics and articulates his views.\u00a0 That articulation varies from matter of fact description to dream interpretation.<\/p>\n
It doesn’t always work, of course.\u00a0 There are passages that seemed overwrought to me.\u00a0 It is clear he’s picking the incidents and anecdotes he relates to hang them on his themes.\u00a0 Taken as a whole, I do find it moving and thought provoking.<\/p>\n
It’s worth pointing out that his experiences all took place before the 2016 presidential election.\u00a0 However one might think this has all changed since then, Cant\u00fa is clear that there was plenty of complexity and emotion here initially.<\/p>\n
I want to put in a good word for the author’s mother.\u00a0 She’s an incidental but powerful character.\u00a0 I’d devour a biography of her.<\/p>\n
Strongly Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Francisco Cant\u00fa has written a book that’s part anthropological field work, part journalism, part memoir, part disputation, and part vision quest.\u00a0 That description sounds like a recipe for a patchwork of artifice, but Cant\u00fa has constructed a work that is much more difficult to describe than it is to understand.\u00a0 It can be difficult to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2649"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2653,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2649\/revisions\/2653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}