...here's what I'm supposed to read, at least on anti-trust. I'd love to see lists like this for a dozen other subjects (Kevin?) (Bob?) (Diane?)
Of course, I am not for a moment suggesting I actually intend to read all this stuff, or any of it. But it's nice to float in the sea of possibility. And I am consoled by Tim Muris' suggestion that if you're reading stuff on anti-trust, you shouldn't be heading the transition team.
I should add that I trust they will not make me head of the transition team anyway. Lucky me. Lucky you. Lucky everybody.
Of course, I am not for a moment suggesting I actually intend to read all this stuff, or any of it. But it's nice to float in the sea of possibility. And I am consoled by Tim Muris' suggestion that if you're reading stuff on anti-trust, you shouldn't be heading the transition team.
I should add that I trust they will not make me head of the transition team anyway. Lucky me. Lucky you. Lucky everybody.
1 comment:
I would have th etransition team read, Luis Urrea, The Devil's Highway (2005). It tells a real story of what is at stake for undocumented immigrants and avoids the legal, economics, and poli sci mumbo jumbo, economicsthat creeps into most serious discussions of immigration. Here is the seller's pitch for the book;
In May 2001, 26 Mexican men scrambled across the border and into an area of the Arizona desert known as the Devil's Highway. Only 12 made it safely across. American Book Awardâ€"winning writer and poet Urrea (Across the Wire; Six Kinds of Sky; etc.), who was born in Tijuana and now lives outside Chicago, tracks the paths those men took from their home state of Veracruz all the way norte. Their enemies were many: the U.S. Border Patrol ("La Migra"); gung-ho gringo vigilantes bent on taking the law into their own hands; the Mexican Federales; rattlesnakes; severe hypothermia and the remorseless sun, a "110 degree nightmare" that dried their bodies and pounded their brains. In artful yet uncomplicated prose, Urrea captivatingly tells how a dozen men squeezed by to safety, and how 14 othersâ€"whom the media labeled the Yuma 14â€"did not. But while many point to the group's smugglers (known as coyotes) as the prime villains of the tragedy, Urrea unloads on, in the words of one Mexican consul, "the politics of stupidity that rules both sides of the border." Mexican and U.S. border policy is backward, Urrea finds, and it does little to stem the flow of immigrants. Since the policy results in Mexicans making the crossing in increasingly forbidding areas, it contributes to the conditions that kill those who attempt it. Confident and full of righteous rage, Urrea's story is a well-crafted mélange of first-person testimony, geographic history, cultural and economic analysis, poetry and an indictment of immigration policy. It may not directly influence the forces behind the U.S.'s southern border travesties, but it does give names and identities to the faceless and maligned "wetbacks" and "pollos," and highlights the brutality and unsustainable nature of the many walls separating the two countries.
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