PositiveThe New York Review of Books[Mehta] turns himself, in effect, into a one-man witness-bearing machine. It is harrowing, heartbreaking, detailed work that does what it sets out to do: illuminate the predicament of specific persons in a universal ethical light ... Mehta’s book is filled with arresting human particulars, but its theoretical thrust can be compressed into three main propositions ... Mehta’s vision is radically redistributive, but it will be received with suspicion by the patriotic left ... This pragmatic approach is not without its contradictions ... It could also be said, of course, that Mehta is dismissive of the cultural and economic anxieties of the host population. But that is precisely his intention: to dismiss the concerns of white natives about having brown foreigners in their midst. Either their concerns are racist and accordingly without merit, or their concerns have some merit, but not as much merit as the concerns of migrants ... A valuable feature of Mehta’s argument is that it is procedurally radical. It rejects the programmatic self-doubt that is central to American liberalism—and, arguably, central to its defeat by its Republican adversaries, who without hesitation embrace self-righteousness, domination, and the fait accompli.
Jill Lepore
MixedThe New York Review of BooksLepore’s exposition of this contradictory terrain is brisk, equitable, dispassionate, and hair-raising. Any suspicion that she was going to advocate for a kind of upbeat revisionism of the American past is dispelled ... The liberal lens, always focused on the most vulnerable subjects of power, remains purposefully in place ... It’s not only liberals who will find sustenance in Lepore’s book. If you’re an ethno-nationalist, you too could wave around This America in support of your claims. Lepore is aware of this fact—there’s little she isn’t aware of, one senses—and makes it integral to her argument, which is that the age-old struggle between illiberal and liberal tendencies is constitutive of the nation ... Lepore voices coherent reservations about the academic drift from the study of the American nation to the study of a world \'grown global, tied together by intricate webs of trade and accelerating forms of transportation and communication.\' To an immigrant like me, however, there is something counterintuitive about the idea that Americans need to focus more than ever on our internal differences. Cultivating at least a basic curiosity about the rest of the world seems to be in order.
