Strangers in the Land

Luo, editor of The New Yorker, builds his history of Chinese exclusion less around policy chronology than around individual lives — merchants, laundrymen, missionaries, bureaucrats — whose small biographies carry the larger argument that America's most sweeping immigration ban was enforced person by person, humiliation by humiliation. Reviewers have praised the sheer density of recovered detail and the book's refusal to let exclusion remain an abstraction, while noting that the cast is large enough that some threads get lost amid the breadth. The throughline, a country arguing with itself for over a century about who counts as American, lands with obvious present-day resonance without Luo needing to underline it.