Made Me Kinda Mad...

Most of the stories in this books are heart-breaking. And even though I am not naive to the evils that have been done by our countrymen and countrywomen throughout the course of history, the stories still made me think, "How did this happen in the U.S.?" Denied Detained Deported is a YA National Geographic publication dealing with the dark side of immigration in

20th century U.S. history. There is the horrible story of the MS St. Louis, a German ship that left Hamburg in 1939 for Cuba. It was supposed to be taking the more than 900 German Jews to find refuge from the persecution in Nazi Germany. When it got there, Cuba wouldn't let anyone off the ship. The captain radioed to the U.S., they wouldn't take them either. The ship had to go back to Europe. Nearly 300 of the refugees ended up dying in the hands of the Nazis before WW2 ended. Man. Unreal.

The book also describes how awful Mexicans have been treated for like, ever! Welcomed when there is come low-paying, horrible work to do, then treated like trash and thrown back out of the country when the work slows up.

The Japanese internment camps are also explored in this book- all of these American citizens had their land and everything taken away from them and were put into barracks like prisoners, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, just because they were of Japanese heritage.

These are really sad stories that make you want to cry. And when you think about how immigrants are treated today, you still want to keep crying because it just never ends.

But then, thrown in this book was the story of the nutbag anarchist, Emma Goldman. Look, I'm all about unions. Heck I boycotted Nabisco until it was bought out by Kraft. But this nutbag Goldman and her freak boyfriend/friend Alexander Berkman were nothing but trouble man. Berkman tried to kill a dude-- Herny Clay Frick. Granted, Frick was a dirtbag and a robber baron, but I'm just saying...how in the heck do you write a book and put innocent folks in it, like exploited Mexicans and Jewish kids and adults who died in concentration camps because of the failures of immigration next to nutbag criminals like these two wackadoos? All they did was get deported. It was like they were stuck in internment barracks or called vicious names like "wet-backs". Their inclusion here seemed way out of place and did a massive disservice to the other horror stories in the book.

Other than that, the book was good, but the writing is a little sluggish.