CANR
WORK TITLE: One Week to Change the World
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WEBSITE: http://www.dwgibson.net/
CITY: New York
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LAST VOLUME: CA 386
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born May 18, 1978; married Tasha Garcia; children: yes.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist and documentary filmmaker. Director of Pants Down; director and producer of the documentary Not Working: The Pulse of the Great Recession, Films Media Group, 2012; has worked on documentaries for the Arts and Entertainment (A&E) Television Network and MSNBC, including The Hate Network and Inside Alcoholics Anonymous. Director of Writers Omi at Ledig House, Ghent, NY; cofounded Sangam House (a writers’ residency) in India; There Goes the Neighborhood podcast cohost.
AWARDS:National Magazine Award, for the article “This Is the Story of One Block in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.”
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Harper’s, New York Times, Washington Post, Nation, Village Voice, and Caravan.
SIDELIGHTS
DW Gibson is a journalist and documentary filmmaker, and he is also the author of several books of oral histories, including Not Working: People Talk about Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today’s Changing Economy; The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the Twenty-First Century; 14 Miles: Building the Border Wall; and One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests. Over the years, he has written pieces for various publications, including Harper’s, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, the Village Voice, and Caravan. He has also been a contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered. Gibson made his directorial debut with Pants Down, which premiered at Anthology Film Archives in New York, and he has worked on documentaries for the Arts and Entertainment (A&E) Television Network and MSNBC, including The Hate Network and Inside Alcoholics Anonymous. He is also the director and producer of the documentary Not Working: The Pulse of the Great Recession, which serves as a companion to the book Not Working. Gibson also serves as the director of Writers Omi at Ledig House in Ghent, New York, and he cofounded Sangam House, a writers’ residency located in India.
(open new1)In an interview in Advice to Writers, Gibson talked about the influence that receiving rejection letters throughout his career had on him pursuing a career as a writer. He recalled that “those early days of paper, of mounting rejection, were the hardest. Each time I received one of those cold, stale sentences it depressed the hell out of me. But usually by nightfall I was on fire again, ready to stick it to the person who had sent the latest slip of paper, ready to prove them wrong.”(close new1)
Not Working
Gibson’s first book, Not Working, is a collection of interviews with people who have recently lost their jobs. It was inspired by the well-known book Working, written by Studs Terkel and published in 1974, which is also an oral history, but one that deals with employed people and how they feel about their jobs. During the summer and fall of 2011, Gibson, along with playwright Mallery Avidon and director and actor MJ Sieber, traveled across the United States, from Orange County, California, to New York City, to interview individuals who lost their jobs over the last five years. They ended up interviewing 200 people for the book, and seventy of those interviews were also used for the documentary.
Craig Fehrman, who reviewed Not Working for the SFGate Web site, felt that “although it offers conventional ideas, it offers them from a fresh perspective. Because when you think about it, we talk about ‘not working’ all the time—every month, in fact, when the latest jobs report comes out. But consider how we talk about those reports: as an economic abstraction or, worse still, as an election-year scoreboard. … In Not Working, Gibson reminds us that the jobs reports represent something else: the people who continue to look.”
The Edge Becomes the Center
Gibson’s second book, The Edge Becomes the Center, contains the stories of New Yorkers who are both affecting and being affected by gentrification. The book is focused on the gentrification of Brooklyn, particularly the Crown Heights and Bedford- Stuyvesant neighborhoods.
“Gibson’s book is not really his book, which is to say that most of the words in it are not his. This might sound glib, but it’s important for the book’s overall effect. In parts it is ephemeral and passing, and just like a conversation you don’t always remember everything you’ve read. Sometimes the intricacies of housing law can get boring. Sometimes Gibson tries to liven it up with novelistic interjections. But the book’s strength lies in moving past Buzzfeed’s wry humour at hipster mores by letting shopkeepers, tenants, community activists, bankers, developers, and landlords speak,” asserted Mark West in a review of The Edge Becomes the Center for the Glasgow Review of Books online. West continued: “Gibson is right to be cynical about the banker and the politician and their preference for the abstractions and platitudes of the macro; he is right, too, to pay attention to the micro, those ‘intricacies of self’ that say the most about the lived experience of gentrification, which is to say, the lived experience of our neoliberal world.” “Gibson makes his political views known, but he is not an overbearing interviewer,” remarked Hannah Gersen in a review for the Millions Web site. “He lets people talk freely about their jobs, their apartments, and their finances. Occasionally he will interrupt a monologue to provide the reader with necessary historical context, or to define an obscure term. Only at the end of the book does Gibson give his take on the word gentrification,” added Gersen.
“Throughout, Mr. Gibson is a skilled and sensitive interlocutor with an eye for the revealing gesture—for how one fastidious subject guards his goatee while eating or how another ‘always—always—yields to the car trying to take the lane in front of him,’” noted New York Times reviewer Parul Sehgal. “But he can get carried away. There are some dismal ‘literary’ flourishes and, more frustratingly, a real lack of internal logic. The first few chapters move sinuously—one character introduces us to another and so on. The structure, however, soon grows scattershot.” In a review on the Austin American- Statesman Web site, Joe Gross echoed a similar sentiment about the book’s structure: “The book works best when Gibson develops this great chain of being, one story flowing into the next; eventually the chapters cease tying together so neatly, which is too bad.”
In an interview with Lee Bob Black on the Paris Review Web site, Gibson discussed his approach to The Edge Becomes the Center: “I approached this book quite differently than my last, Not Working. With that book, I stayed out of the way. I allowed people to share painful experiences, and through that sharing there might have been a sense of community that developed around catharsis. But this is different. This is a complex issue that causes a lot of people pain and makes a lot of people money. It’s complicated. So it wasn’t going to be about collective catharsis or me allowing people the space to share intimate hurt publicly.” He continued: “This is about a variety of perspectives, some of which I personally identify with, some I find offensive, some I find foreign. I needed to make a hybrid of oral history and reportage. Each chapter is anchored to the interview and the subject I spoke to. But I really tried to frame it and provide each chapter with a historical context, connecting dots between interviewees. I wanted oral history to be the backbone, because I wanted these people to speak for themselves.”
14 Miles and One Week to Change the World
(open new2)In 14 Miles, Gibson focused on a fourteen-mile stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border near the cities of San Diego and Tijuana where a border wall prototype was erected as per President Donald Trump’s instruction. Gibson spoke with individuals on both sides of the border to measure how its construction would impact their lives, including businesspeople, human rights activists, border patrol agents, and intending migrants. He also discussed the wall with a member of the Kumeyaay tribe, whose historical land was sliced in two with the addition of the wall.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly claimed that the author’s “multifaceted portrait makes a meaningful contribution to the question of what a humane and sensible immigration policy would look like.” Booklist contributor Cynthia Dieden pointed out that all actors who are involved in the border wall issue are “given voices within Gibson’s enlightening and inclusive report on the walled border.” In a review in Library Journal, Susan E. Montgomery opined that “this engaging book will appeal to anyone interested in learning more about who lives along the border.”
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Shane Bauer remarked that “the juicy anecdotes keep the book spicy, but the sheer number of people crammed into the pages prevents any character from ever becoming fully developed. Gibson also falls into a familiar pitfall of contemporary journalistic writing, putting himself in the story even though his character doesn’t give us any deeper insight into the subject. The book sometimes reads a bit like a travelogue of Gibson’s own adventures.” However, Bauer conceded that “Gibson’s book stands out from the pack in other important ways. So much of today’s journalism lacks context for Trump’s immigration policies. In 14 Miles, the president’s attack on immigration is rightly presented as the latest in a long history of attempts to keep, or kick, foreigners out.”
One Week to Change the World looks at the mass protests to the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Specifically, Gibson records the thoughts and opinions of participants of the protest, both from the protesters and from the police. He noted that some police were more hesitant in treating the protesters with the force that others so willing delivered. Among the protesters, Gibson recorded statements from teenagers and activists. He also considered how these protests portrayed Americans as not being fully supportive of its government’s corporate globalization policies. A Kirkus Reviews contributor labeled it “a readable, provocative study of globalism and anti-globalism in conflict.”(close new2)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 15, 2020, Cynthia Dieden, review of 14 Miles: Building the Border Wall, p. 4.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2015, review of The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the Twenty-First Century; May 15, 2024, review of One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests.
Library Journal, June 1, 2020, Susan E. Montgomery, review of 14 Miles, p. 100.
New York Times Book Review, July 5, 2020, Shane Bauer, review of 14 Miles, p. 11.
Publishers Weekly, March 23, 2015, review of The Edge Becomes the Center, p. 61; April 20, 2020, review of 14 Miles, p. 61.
ONLINE
Advice to Writers, https://advicetowriters.com/ (November 10, 2020), author interview.
Austin American-Statesman Online, http://www.mystatesman.com/ (June 12, 2015), Joe Gross, review of The Edge Becomes the Center.
DW Gibson website, http://www.dwgibson.net (June 15, 2024).
Glasgow Review of Books Online, http://glasgowreviewofbooks.com/ (July 30, 2015), Mark West, review of The Edge Becomes the Center.
Millions, http:// www.themillions.com/ (May 20, 2015), Hannah Gersen, review of The Edge Becomes the Center.
New York Times Online, http://www.nytimes.com/ (May 14, 2015), Parul Sehgal, review of The Edge Becomes the Center.
Not Working Web site, http://notworkingproject.com (January 9, 2016).
Paris Review Online, http://www.theparisreview.org/ (May 21, 2015), Lee Bob Black, author interview.
Riverfront Times Online, http://www.riverfronttimes.com/ (July 25, 2012), Aimee Levitt, “Working and Not Working: DW Gibson Talks about His Conversations with America’s Unemployed.”
SFGate, http:// www.sfgate.com/ (June 27, 2012), Craig Fehrman, review of Not Working: People Talk about Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today’s Changing Economy.*
DW Gibson is most recently the author of One Week To Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests. His previous books include the awarding-winning The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the Twenty-First Century, 14 Miles: Building the Border Wall, and Not Working: People Talk About Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today’s Changing Economy. He shared a National Magazine Award for his work on “This is the Story of One Block in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn” for New York magazine. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Gibson’s radio work includes co-hosting the podcast There Goes the Neighborhood, guest hosting various news programs for WNYC, and reading original essays for Live From Here as well as NPR’s All Things Considered. His documentary film, Not Working, a companion to the book, is available through Films Media Group. His directorial debut, Pants Down, premiered at Anthology Film Archives in New York.
Gibson serves as director of Art Omi: Writers in Ghent, New York, and he co-founded Sangam House, a writers’ residency in India, along with Arshia Sattar.
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ATW INTERVIEWS
D.W. Gibson
November 10, 2020
How did you become a writer?
I have a file folder filled with rejection letters sent to me by editors and agents over the years. They aren’t really letters but boiler-plate sentences, usually beginning with “Thank you…” (Note: if you ever get a message from and editor or agent that begins with those two words you don’t need to read the rest because it’s not what you want to hear.) Many of the rejections aren’t even printed on full size pieces of paper; they’re mere slips, which, in a way, I admire because it saves paper. The file folder reminds me just how long I’ve been accumulating rejections: I go back as far as the days of paper.
I still get rejections—any writer who tries to convince someone that rejections go away is not being honest. But those early days of paper, of mounting rejection, were the hardest. Each time I received one of those cold, stale sentences it depressed the hell out of me. But usually by nightfall I was on fire again, ready to stick it to the person who had sent the latest slip of paper, ready to prove them wrong. And that’s the thing about rejection. It can have two very different effects, depending on the recipient. The first possible effect is complete deflation, either with one defining blow or as slow seepage over time. The second possible effect of rejection is that it ends up fueling an inextinguishable fire. Those who are deflated – and, ultimately, defeated – are not writers. Those who are set ablaze by rejection can’t help themselves. So I guess that’s how I became a writer: when I came out of my mother’s womb as one of those people bound to catch fire.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).
When I was a kid both of the ministers at my family’s church—Paul Thomas and Andy Wall—spent many hours over many years reading and responding to my work. As a teenager, I read mostly playwrights, a lot of Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard, August Wilson. It was all very dramatic, probably too dramatic, but I gained a deep appreciation for beautiful sentences, raw emotion and reading between the lines. James Kelman was the first serious writer to take me seriously as a writer. I took a workshop with him in college and he gave us all a list of a couple dozen writers we should read. I had never heard of most of them, there were very few white men and they didn’t all write in English—I am still grateful to him for that list. He introduced me to great voices like Tillie Olsen, Sam Selvon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Lu Hsun. There are several writers I return to, again and again, for clarity: James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Carlos Eire, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison, VS Naipaul and Vladimir Nabokov among them.
When and where do you write?
Before I became a father, I was very sanctimonious about where and when I could write: a minimum of two hours, please, uninterrupted, preferably late at night, probably with some Lee Morgan or Herbie Hancock in the background. These days, give me a cup of coffee, 10 minutes and laptop and I’ll make the most of it. I’ve learned to carry my work in my head better, let it maturate there, and I’ve learned to get into the text more immediately when I sit down because the clock is always ticking.
I have a desk and work at it sometimes but I’m apt to move around in my family’s house. Sometimes I find it helpful to feel a certain newness to the spot where I’m working—it can be invigorating. It depends on how the work is going. If I get into a groove then I stay in the same spot for a few days, to keep the mojo going. It’s kind of a feel thing, like with slot machines.
What are you working on now?
I just published a story about the Kumeyaay, a nation of indigenous Americans who have been living in their region of present-day California for 12,000 years. It’s a region that was cut in half 172 years ago when the Mexico-U.S. border was established. Now the federal government is building a wall through the Kumeyaay’s ancestral land, bulldozing burial grounds and lives in the process.
Right now I’m working on a story about the “Explorer” program run by Border Patrol. It trains kids as young as 14 on what it’s like to be an agent. It’s an interesting lens through which to consider how we teach borders and talk about them as a society.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?
Look, I can always manage to get some kind of unreadable text down so I rarely come up empty but, yes, it’s safe to say that meaningful progress on any given text is never consistent and reliable. There are always bad detours and misguided love affairs with the wrong sentence. And some days all I can hear in my head is that song from Burt in Mary Poppins. If you can get past Dick Van Dyke’s cartoonish British accent the lyrics are haunting: “You’ve got to grind, grind, grind at that grindstone.” Some days I’m definitely grinding but it always—eventually—leads somewhere.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
I had the pleasure of sitting in on an interview with Edward Albee and he said, “There are two things that can destroy a writer: success and failure.” While there is something deeply unsettling and depressing about this it is also really clarifying. It crystalizes an important truth for me: the only acceptable rudder for a writer is doing good work. You have to be able to get satisfaction and fulfillment from doing good work – it’s the only thing that you can control, after all.
I think one of the great divides in the land of advice-to-writers is whether or not one should strive to write every day. I subscribe to the idea that it needs to be a daily practice. Even if it means some grinding every now and then—there’s value in seeing and understanding how, exactly, bad writing is bad. Also, see earlier point about the only acceptable rudder for a writer: doing good work. If I don’t at least try to do good work then the end of the day is definitely very hollow.
What’s your advice to new writers?
Get out while you still can!
And if you don’t like that advice: welcome to the club. I’m your ally and happy to help however I can.
D.W. Gibson is most recently the author of 14 MILES: Building the Border Wall. His previous books include the awarding-winning The Edge Becomes the Center and Not Working. He shared a National Magazine Award for his work on “This is the Story of One Block in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn” for New York magazine. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Mother Jones and The Nation. He serves as director of Art Omi: Writers in Ghent, New York, and he co-founded Sangam House, a writers’ residency in India, along with Arshia Sattar.
Gibson, DW ONE WEEK TO CHANGE THE WORLD Simon & Schuster (NonFiction None) $18.99 6, 18 ISBN: 9781668033562
A fly-on-the-wall history of a fateful gathering of capitalist trade ministers in 1999.
What is the World Trade Organization? By some lights, it's a group that makes sure that international business plays by the rules. By others, it's a means by which the major capitalist powers keep the developing world on a string. As Gibson, author of 14 Miles and The Edge Becomes the Center, recounts, representatives from a host of nations came to Seattle seeking to lock down an agenda that would make the "Quad"--the European Union, the U.S., Japan, and Canada--de facto rulers of the global economy. Thousands came to protest. Says one leading anti-WTO organizer of those street actions, "For people within the U.S. to break from the idea that Americans support their government's corporate globalization policies was a big shift in how the world saw things." The police had a different view, but some were less inclined to bust skulls and haul protestors off to jail than others. Similarly, Gibson reveals, some protestors were looking for an excuse to break things, while most, as one government worker related, "were the model kids--if you had a teenager, how you would want them to be." A labor council leader was even more conciliatory: "This is what democracy looks like. Sometimes it's ugly. And sometimes it's not. We all have a responsibility and role to play, one way or the other." Interestingly, Gibson records, several organizers from the day lament that, today, social media keeps people from banding together in person, even as governments learned a lesson and now maintain deep cordons between WTO meetings and any possible discontents--who, notes one contributor, now run the risk of being "viewed as a Trumpist in some way" for opposing so-called free trade.
A readable, provocative study of globalism and anti-globalism in conflict.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Gibson, DW: ONE WEEK TO CHANGE THE WORLD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A793537067/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4d16a4fb. Accessed 27 May 2024.
Gibson, D.W.: 14 Miles: Building the Border Wall. S. & S. Jul. 2020. 352p. ISBN 9781501183416. $28. SOC SCI
From 2017 to 2019, journalist and author Gibson (The Edge Becomes the Center) researched a small stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border. That 14-mile stretch where construction companies built border wall prototypes as part of Trump's campaign promise to reinforce the border is the focus of this well-documented narrative. Gibson interviewed people who live, work, and depend on this space for their livelihood, including a member of the Kumeyaay tribe whose ancestors lived on this land for generations, a San Diego contractor who submitted a border wall prototype, and a U.S. Border Patrol agent hoping to train teenagers to work at the agency. The author states early on that he is "searching for a way to figure out what a border really looks like in an increasingly interconnected world." For those who live along this small stretch of terrain, this space carries a heavy significance. For some it is their livelihood and for others it is their history. Gibson delves into the human element behind these 14 miles. VERDICT Written in a narrative style, this engaging book will appeal to anyone interested in learning more about who lives along the border and what a wall means to them. --Susan E. Montgomery, Rollins Coll., Winter Park, FL
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Montgomery, Susan E. "Gibson, D.W.: 14 Miles: Building the Border Wall." Library Journal, vol. 145, no. 6, June 2020, pp. 100+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A625862047/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0b14c08b. Accessed 27 May 2024.
14 MILESBuilding the Border WallBy DW Gibson
It's hard to imagine a more apt setting for an American dystopia: an exposition far out in the desert, right on the United States-Mexico border, where contractors display 30-foot-tall prototypes of President Donald Trump's ''big beautiful wall.'' There are no protesters because the government banished them to an empty lot several miles away. Border agents, sheriffs and Homeland Security officials peruse the site, debating the merits of each design. Do they prefer a barrier that is solid like a prison wall or with slits to allow them to see threats as they approach from Mexico? Stick with plain cement or go for the royal blue? Will the wall withstand climbers, diggers, pickaxes, torches and sledgehammers?
The endeavor is absurd, and even the contractors seem to know it. ''The 2,000 miles is never going to happen in a hundred million years,'' one tells DW Gibson, the author of ''14 Miles.'' Yet, the project continues.
Two hundred meters from the prototype site, on the Mexican side of the border, a young woman named Aurelia Avila watches the scene unfold daily from her scrap wood home. She can't come to terms with why the American president wants another wall. Between her house and the United States there is already a nine-foot barrier of corrugated metal, and behind that there is another that is twice as tall. Then there is the impossible-to-navigate bureaucracy that keeps people like her out -- she was born in America and came to Mexico as an infant, but she can't get the documents to prove she's American.
Avila is one of a kaleidoscope of characters who appear in Gibson's book. As the wall makes its slow march forward, Gibson sets out on a quest to meet people whose lives are connected to the border. It's hard to think of an archetype he doesn't profile. Gibson talks to border agents, a former coyote, members of the patriot movement, activists who trek into the desert to drop jugs of water for thirsty migrants, members of the much-maligned immigrant caravan that walked from Guatemala, a man whose job is to explore tunnels dug under the border and many more.
Some of the people Gibson encounters view the border as the first line of defense against those who will degrade our country. For others, like a Haitian asylum seeker, the border is one obstacle among many in the search for a better life. Then there are those for whom the border is a business opportunity: maquila owners, fentanyl dealers and the 2016 presidential hopeful and real estate baron Roque De La Fuente. De La Fuente says the wall ''is a crazy-stupid idea,'' but in the end, he says, ''I'm in the business of making money.'' Owning 2,000 acres of desert land abutting the border, De La Fuente essentially has the government surrounded. He knows they'll come knocking when construction begins, and he won't be selling cheap. The feds once asked to buy land from him in order to build an immigrant detention center near a border crossing, and De La Fuente offered to sell the plot for $8.4 million. It was four times more than what the government was willing to pay, so they tried to take it from him using eminent domain. He took the government to court and came out with $39 million.
Money does wonders to help one sleep at night. Consider the contractor who tells Gibson he is ''pro-immigrant,'' but ''if they're going to build a wall, then I think it needs to be done right.'' His ''very liberal'' sisters are his business partners and he convinces them to submit a proposal by promising they'd use local help from both sides of the border. And where the government was only insisting that the north side of the wall be decorated, their proposal would ''enhance'' both sides. ''One of the things I personally believe is that if you build a fence, you ask your neighbor what they would like to look at,'' the contractor says. No one of course is asking the neighbors, but such window dressings help soothe the conscience of a conflicted capitalist.
The problem, officials are repeatedly telling Gibson, is illegal immigration. They have no issues with people who enter legally. One of the faults of this logic is that many who attempt to seek asylum in America are turned away by customs agents at the border on orders of the president. This policy is illegal; United States law requires border authorities to refer them to asylum officers who will determine whether or not they are safe to return home. When they cannot enter lawfully, some find other ways. On a number of occasions while Gibson is at the prototype site, he witnesses people climbing over the fence. They try to cross there for a reason: Border patrol agents are always present, so they know they can turn themselves in to be shipped off to detention and begin their asylum proceedings.
The book's 60 short chapters are easy to gobble up, especially since Gibson is constantly peppering us with surreal tidbits. At one point, he follows around a correspondent from the conspiracy-mongering media outlet Infowars while she lobs candy at the feet of children in the migrant caravan. Looking at her warily, few take the bait. ''Obviously if these kids were hungry,'' she says into her camera, ''they would be taking the food. Clearly they are being well fed here in Mexico.'' The correspondent scours the crowd and finds a trans woman. The woman tells the correspondent she has people back home who love her, but the possibility of violence is too high. You can feel the gears of the Infowars brain turning, crafting a narrative that completely edits out the part about danger: Trans person comes to America, despite having people who love her back home. ''And there are more of you coming?'' the correspondent asks.
The juicy anecdotes keep the book spicy, but the sheer number of people crammed into the pages prevents any character from ever becoming fully developed. Gibson also falls into a familiar pitfall of contemporary journalistic writing, putting himself in the story even though his character doesn't give us any deeper insight into the subject. The book sometimes reads a bit like a travelogue of Gibson's own adventures. It can be disjointing to go from a state representative discussing immigration reform to Gibson quipping about the bad coffee he's drinking at Denny's.
But Gibson's book stands out from the pack in other important ways. So much of today's journalism lacks context for Trump's immigration policies. In ''14 Miles,'' the president's attack on immigration is rightly presented as the latest in a long history of attempts to keep, or kick, foreigners out. In the 1950s, Gibson reminds us, Operation Wetback enforced large-scale deportations of workers who stayed in the country after their manual labor contracts expired. In 1994, the Clinton administration implemented Nafta, opening the border for goods and industry while further restricting the flow of people.
If anything, Trump's wall is the embodiment of a longstanding illusion of American permanence and superiority. In one chapter, a native Kumeyaay tells Gibson that the land where the prototype site was built was once the territory of his tribe. The Spanish took it from them in 1798, then the Mexicans took it in 1821, then the United States took it in 1848. ''You know, the U.S. has only been a country for a little more than 200 years,'' the man tells Gibson. ''They think it's going to be around forever. My friend, these boundaries are not static.''
''But in America,'' Gibson writes, ''nothing says stasis like a 30-foot-high barrier.''
Shane Bauer is the author of ''American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey Into the Business of Punishment.'' 14 MILES Building the Border Wall By DW Gibson 352 pp. Simon & Schuster. $28.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: The border wall prototypes on display. (PHOTOGRAPH BY FREDERIC J. BROWN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE -- GETTY IMAGES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Bauer, Shane. "Great Wall." The New York Times Book Review, 5 July 2020, p. 11(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A628547677/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3313d051. Accessed 27 May 2024.
14 Miles: Building the Border Wall. By D. W. Gibson. July 2020. 352p. Simon & Schuster, $28 (9781501183416).624.
Nearly every American is familiar with die 2016 campaign cries of "Build that wall!" Gibson, best known for his books about gentrification and unemployment, takes us to the San Diego County-Tijuana border, where that promise was becoming reality. He spent two years, from May 2017 to June 2019, first awaiting, then watching the construction and eventual testing of eight prototypes in the running to become "the wall." Gibson's firsthand accounts and comments on his broken Spanish and the quality of whatever coffee he's being subjected to bring a personal edge to his observations and research on a topic with international reach and spanning decades. In the shadow of the prototypes, Gibson seeks out people willing to share their experiences of and perspectives on the impact of the many forces at work on the border. Among them are hopeful concrete salespeople, activists leaving water in the desert for migrants, a real-estate millionaire with presidential aspirations (not the obvious one), border patrol agents, and so-called caravan migrants. They're all given voices within Gibson's enlightening and inclusive report on the walled border.--Cynthia Dieden
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
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Dieden, Cynthia. "14 Miles: Building the Border Wall." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 18, 15 May 2020, p. 4. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A627001242/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c13e6da1. Accessed 27 May 2024.
14 Miles: Building the Border Wall
D.W. Gibson. Simon & Schuster, $28 (352p) ISBN 978-1-5011-8341-6
In this empathetic, voice-driven account, journalist Gibson (Not Working) reports from the U.S.-Mexico border between San Diego and Tijuana during the development and construction of a 14-mile stretch of President Trump's border wall. Visiting the area between 2017 and 2019, Gibson interviews people living on both sides of the border, including Aurelia Avila, a young Mexican-American' woman who collects recyclables in Tijuana; Civile Ephedouard, a Haitian refugee seeking asylum in San Diego; and Lance LeNoir, a member of the San Diego Sector Confined Space Entry Team, who patrols subterranean passageways between the U.S and Mexico. Their overlapping perspectives set the book apart from more didactic, issue-driven accounts. Gibson quotes an ICE special agent who asks "how many people is our infrastructure designed to take?" and relates the story of a retired Methodist minister and aid worker whose neighbor once said that the value of her home was more important than the value of a refugee's life. More philosophical meditation on the meaning and function of a border than hard-hitting expose, Gibson's multifaceted portrait makes a meaningful contribution to the question of what a humane and sensible immigration policy would look like. Readers will be left with a lot to ponder. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, the Gernert Agency. (July)
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"14 Miles: Building the Border Wall." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 16, 20 Apr. 2020, pp. 61+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A623444714/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9431e036. Accessed 27 May 2024.