Human Rights and Wrongs

-- 2017 SUNSHOT BOOK PRIZE FOR NONFICTION --

A gift of truth for a generation of Dreamers, a vault of memories for their parents, and a record of shame, pride, sorrow, humor, and forgotten fact for a nation of immigrants.

One comes away from Human Rights and Wrongs knowing more about motivation, fear, risk-taking, and problem solving than when one began. But more than that, one knows more about the conditions of oppression that force people from all over--Central America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, North Africa--to flee their countries, and the conditions of human support and solidarity that help them rebuild shattered lives.

A broken immigration system that leaves a child in Arizona without parents and a man in El Salvador without children may make one cry. But there's much to celebrate, too, like positive outcomes in asylum hearings, the beauty of volunteer efforts that ransom a student out of immigration detention, the helicopter rescue of a writer lost in the woods.

Dr. Aron's book is both instructive and uplifting, and a fierce rebuke to anti-immigrant voices booming across our spacious skies.