内容摘要：Through aggressive social media and television campaigns, they’re encouraging people in the country illegally to go home, saying that otherwise they could face fines and never be allowed back into America.

Through aggressive social media and television campaigns, they’re encouraging people in the country illegally to go home, saying that otherwise they could face fines and never be allowed back into America.

who is also on the mountain currently and expected to make the climb in the next few days.Pulitzer Prize-winning author

of the country’s most enduring figures, includingSo it comes as no surprise that his biography of author and humorist Mark Twain clocks in at more than 1,000 pages.It’s also forgivable, considering that Twain was such a colossal figure in American literature and history that his authorized biography was more than 1,500 pages long.

Chernow’s “Mark Twain” is well worth that length to learn more about the author best known for introducing readers to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.Chernow’s book aptly portrays Twain as someone who “fairly invented our celebrity culture,” the precursor to the influencers that dominate our lives today. Twain had no qualms about cashing in on his fame, with his name being used to promote cigars, pipes and other products.

But Twain was known just as much for the attitude linked to the humorist and his works. Twain, as Chernow describes him, was “someone willing to tangle with anyone, make enemies and say aloud what other people only dared to think.”

Chernow’s biography avoids the trap of idolizing Twain and gives an honest assessment of the author’s life, including his flaws and contradictions.LYRIC: Down in the shadow of the penitentiary, out by the gas fires of the refinery: I’m 10 years burnin’ down the road; nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go.”

YEAR/ALBUM: 1984, “Born in the USA”BACKSTORY: Springsteen’s most misinterpreted song — misread by Ronald Reagan and many politicians after him — tells the tale of a Vietnam vet who lost his brother in the war and came home to no job prospects and a bleak future. The driving, catchy chorus — composed primarily of the words from the song’s title, which made misunderstanding it easier — turned it into an anthem, albeit one that was not a burst of patriotism but a bitter description of veterans’ circumstances.

LYRIC: “Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores/Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more.”YEAR/ALBUM: 1984, “Born in the USA”