Tag: citizenship

Posted on

#BookReview: Citizenship by Daisy Hernandez

Ironic Downfall. Seriously, how much more ironic can you get than a book about citizenship being felled by… *a lack of documentation*????

To be clear, there are *many* more issues with this book. The biggest being that it is marketed as a critical and intellectual examination of the concept of citizenship (which is intriguing and deserves to be written about)… and instead what we actually get is a racist memoir that openly proclaims that the entire concept of citizenship was created whole cloth in the US in the 19th century to keep the brown person down and give the evil white man a way to exclude brown people while claiming to be objective. Seriously.

Now, maybe that last bit is something you tend to agree with. Even there, you should be pissed off at this book because it doesn’t even begin to try to objectively make this case. Further, when you make an extraordinary claim such as what this book proposes, the Sagan Standard applies and extraordinary evidence is expected – yet there is next to no documentation, clocking in at just 8% of the Advance Review Copy that I’ve had for four months before finally reading it just weeks before publication.

All of this noted, it actually was rather intriguing as a personal memoir of one person’s thoughts and experiences on the subject at hand. So yes, *as a personal memoir*, this book works much better than as any form of objective intellectual endeavor, and from the memoir angle it really is a compelling read of one person’s thoughts.

But that’s not what this is being marketed as, at least at this stage. At this stage, it is being marketed as much as a scholarly work as memoir, and as a scholarly work this book utterly fails in every conceivable respect.

Still, read this book as a memoir. Please. Hernandez has a clear and rare voice, and her story needs to be heard. I just wish she had put as much effort into integrating it into an actual objective examination of the topic as she did in expressing how evil the white man is.

Recommended.

This review of Citizenship by Daisy Hernandez was originally written on January 23, 2026.

Posted on

Featured New Release of the Week: The Sum of the People by Andrew Whitby

This week we’re looking at a history of the origins and current uses of the census – at the very time the United States Census officially begins. This week, we’re looking at The Sum of Us The People by Andrew Whitby.

I don’t exactly hide the fact that despite reading quite a few books, at heart I’m a numbers and computing guy. And few things get more numeric than efforts to count literally billions of people around the world in the span of just a year or two – the very subject of this book, and efforts that officially began a couple of months ago when this post (and the book it is about) are published. (I sit here writing this post on New Year’s Day 2020, having made this book the first book I read in the year the Census begins in the US.)

And y’all, Whitby does a seemingly excellent job of taking a complex and complicated subject like the modern realities of counting people – particularly when such counts can lead to shifts in power – and boiling it down so that anyone, even those without the mathematical foundations Whitby and I share a portion of, can understand what is happening, why, and why both are important. He states early on that a primary goal is writing a book that can be understood by most anyone, and to me it seems he has done an exemplary job of this.

I might nitpick about his discussions of the beginnings of computing and even the mathematics of statistics as its own field of study (among others), but neither does my own cursory knowledge of those areas allow me to outright refute them. So while I tend to think that he *may* have overstated his case in believing that these things came about due to a need to count people, I cannot be positive of this and his arguments are well documented and worthy of critical examination. (And here, he has provided nearly 25% of this text in notes and bibliography – generally a sign of a very thoroughly researched and presented discussion, in my experience.)

Truly a fascinating book, and one anyone remotely interested in the how or why of a census should read. Very much recommended.

As always, the Amazon/ Goodreads review:
Continue reading “Featured New Release of the Week: The Sum of the People by Andrew Whitby”