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SURVEILLANCE STATE de Josh Chin & Liza Lin

A groundbreaking work of investigative nonfiction on life in China’s burgeoning surveillance state.

SURVEILLANCE STATE:
Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control
by Josh Chin and Liza Lin
St. Martin’s Press, September 2022

People living in democracies have for decades drawn comfort from the notion that their form of government, for all its flaws, is the best history has managed to produce. SURVEILLANCE STATE documents with startling detail how even as China’s Communist Party pays lip service to democracy as a core value of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” it is striving for something new: a political model that shapes the will of the people not through the ballot box but through the sophisticated―and often brutal―harnessing of data.
On the country’s remote Central Asian frontier, where a separatist movement strains against Party control, China’s leaders have built a dystopian police state that keeps millions under the constant gaze of security forces armed with AI. Across the country in the city of Hangzhou, the government is weaving a digital utopia, where tech giants help optimize the friction out of daily life. Award-winning journalists Josh Chin and Liza Lin take readers on a journey through both places, and several in between, as they document the Party’s ambitious push―aided, in some cases, by American technology―to engineer a new society around the power of digital surveillance.
China is hardly alone. As faith in democratic principles wavers, advances in surveillance have upended debate about the balance between security and liberty in countries around the globe, including the US. Succeed or fail, the Chinese experiment has implications for people everywhere.

Josh Chin is Deputy Bureau Chief in China for The Wall Street Journal. He previously covered politics and tech in China for the newspaper for more than a decade. He led an investigative team that won the Gerald Loeb Award for international reporting in 2018. Born in Utah, he lives in Taiwan.
Liza Lin works as the journalist covering data use and privacy for The Wall Street Journal from Singapore. Liza was part of the Journal team that won the Loeb in 2018. Prior to the WSJ, Liza spent nine years at Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Television.

ALL ELSE FAILED de Dana Sachs

As a million displaced people sought refuge in Europe, the global relief system failed. This is the story of the volunteers who stepped forward to help.

ALL ELSE FAILED:
The Unlikely Volunteers at the Heart of the Migrant Aid Crisis
by Dana Sachs
‎ Bellevue Literary Press, March 2023
(via Kaplan/Defiore Rights)

In 2015, increasing numbers of refugees and migrants, most of them fleeing war-torn homelands, arrived by boat on the shores of Greece, setting off the greatest human displacement since WWII. As journalists reported horrific mass drownings, an ill-prepared and seemingly indifferent world looked on. Those who reached Europe needed food, clothing, medicine, and shelter, but the international aid system broke down completely.
ALL ELSE FAILED is Dana Sachs’s compelling eyewitness account of the successes—and failures—of the volunteer relief network that emerged to meet the enormous need. People from around the globe pitched in to address the crisis. Yet the most dedicated and effective volunteers were often migrants themselves, including Rima, a mother of six, who cooked for four hundred refugees in an abandoned schoolhouse in Athens; Ibrahim, who managed donations flowing to the grassroots effort; and Sami, whose language skills helped fellow migrants navigate a foreign world.
Closely following the odysseys of seven individual men and women, and their families, ALL ELSE FAILED tells a story of despair and resilience, revealing the humanity within an immense humanitarian disaster.

Dana Sachs is a journalist, novelist, and cofounder of the nonprofit Humanity Now: Direct Refugee Relief, which supports grassroots teams providing aid to displaced people. A former Fulbright Scholar, she is the author of three works of nonfiction, The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam; The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam; and All Else Failed: The Unlikely Volunteers at the Heart of the Migrant Aid Crisis (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press in March 2023), as well as the novels If You Lived Here and The Secret of the Nightingale Palace. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, and Mother Jones. Sachs lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

DEPORTED de Caitlin Dickerson

From an award-winning investigative reporter currently at The Atlantic and formerly of the New York Times, the definitive book to address the American deportation system.

DEPORTED: The Hidden Toll of American Expulsion
by Caitlin Dickerson
Random House, Autumn 2024
(via The Gernert Company)

Deportation is a system that pervades every aspect of American life, yet remains largely invisible. In popular discourse, it is treated as a discrete event affecting one person at a single time; in fact, the devastating ripple effect of deportation has a closer analogue in the destabilization felt by millions of Black American households when their sons and fathers are swept into our mass incarceration system. The households of deported immigrants, as well as those who live with the daily fear of expulsion, have been grappling with a similar reality on a massive and underrecognized scale.
Based on her many years of reporting on our immigration system, DEPORTED will be the definitive book to address the complexity and complicity of the American deportation system. Following the people caught in the middle of the system, it is a multi-generational story that spans cities, suburbs, and farmland and knits together an entire continent. Dickerson will reveal how the “deportation machine” has grown largely unchecked into both a multibillion dollar industry and a powerful lobbying force behind harsher policies designed to further increase profits. The narrative centers on the millions of “essential workers” we rely on every day to to pick and serve our food, to clean and build our houses, to care for our children and our elders. At its heart, DEPORTED asks: how did we come to subjugate an entire population living alongside us to a permanent lower class? What harms have resulted, and how can we begin to repair them?

Caitlin Dickerson is a staff writer at the Atlantic where she covers immigration and the American experience. She joined the Atlantic after five years at the New York Times, where she broke news about changes in deportation and detention policy and its consequences. She also served as a frequent guest and guest-host for “The Daily.” Dickerson is the winner of a Peabody and Edward R Murrow Award and three-time finalist for the Livingston Award. She lives in Brooklyn.

YOU SOUND LIKE A WHITE GIRL de Julissa Arce

Bestselling author Julissa Arce brings readers a powerful polemic against the myth that assimilation leads to happiness and belonging for immigrants in America. Instead, she calls for a celebration of our uniqueness, our origins, our heritage, and the beauty of the differences that make us Americans.

YOU SOUND LIKE A WHITE GIRL:
The Case for Rejecting Assimilation
by Julissa Arce
‎ Flatiron Books/St. Martin’s Press, March 2022

“You sound like a white girl.” These were the words spoken to Julissa by a high school crush as she struggled to find her place in America. As a brown immigrant from Mexico, assimilation had been demanded of her since the moment she set foot in San Antonio, Texas, in 1994. She’d spent so much time getting rid of her accent so no one could tell English was her second language that in that moment she felt those words―you sound like a white girl?―were a compliment. As a child, she didn’t yet understand that assimilating to “American” culture really meant imitating “white” America―that sounding like a white girl was a racist idea meant to tame her, change her, and make her small. She ran the race, completing each stage, but never quite fit in, until she stopped running altogether.
In this dual polemic and manifesto, Julissa dives into and tears apart the lie that assimilation leads to belonging. She combs through history and her own story to break down this myth, arguing that assimilation is a moving finish line designed to keep Black and brown Americans and immigrants chasing racist American ideals. She talks about the Lie of Success, the Lie of Legality, the Lie of Whiteness, and the Lie of English―each promising that if you obtain these things, you will reach acceptance and won’t be an outsider anymore. Julissa deftly argues that these demands leave her and those like her in a purgatory―neither able to secure the power and belonging within whiteness nor find it in the community and cultures whiteness demands immigrants and people of color leave behind.
In YOU SOUND LIKE A WHITE GIRL, Julissa offers a bold new promise: Belonging only comes through celebrating yourself, your history, your culture, and everything that makes you uniquely you. Only in turning away from the white gaze can we truly make America beautiful. An America where difference is celebrated, heritage is shared and embraced, and belonging is for everyone. Through unearthing veiled history and reclaiming her own identity, Julissa shows us how to do this.

Julissa Arce is a nationally recognized author, sought-after speaker, producer, and social changemaker. She is the best-selling author of My (Underground) American Dream and Someone Like Me. Arce is a Crooked media contributor and a frequent writer for TIME Magazine, and has provided political commentary across numerous TV networks including NBC News, Bloomberg TV, CNN, and MSNBC. She is the cofounder of the Ascend Educational Fund, a college scholarship and mentorship program for immigrant students regardless of their immigration status. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.

ORT OHNE WIEDERKEHR de Mihrigul Tursun & Andrea Claudia Hoffmann

The first book worldwide by a survivor of the Chinese concentration camps.

ORT OHNE WIEDERKEHR
(A Place of No Return)
by Mihrigul Tursun & Andrea Claudia Hoffmann
Heyne/ Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe, February 2022

Human rights organisations and governments speak of a crime against humanity, a « cultural genocide ». Mihrigul Tursun has repeatedly been a victim of Chinese efforts to totally assimilate the Uyghur minority. She experienced the so-called « re-education camps » in their indescribable cruelty, the physical and psychological violence, first hand. In a way that remains unexplained to this day, her young son died while she was imprisoned. Today, despite the threat that has not disappeared even in exile, she has the courage to speak openly about what she experienced and to describe from her own experience what the Uyghur minority in China has to endure. A significant eyewitness account that brings the reader closer to the people behind the news from China.

Uyghur Mihrigul Tursun, born in 1989, was imprisoned several times in the Chinese « re-education camps » of Xinjiang. During her detention, one of her sons died in Chinese custody under unexplained circumstances. On 28 November 2018, Mihrigul Tursun gave her harrowing testimony before the US Congress (Congressional-Executive Commission on China). She described the inhumane conditions and torture methods in the camps. In December 2018, Tursun was awarded the Citizen Power Award.
Andrea C. Hoffmann works in the political editorial department of the news magazine Focus and teaches at various German universities. Her books have been translated into 17 languages worldwide.

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