A deeply valuable study of the decline of suburbia.
A well-informed, ambitious narrative about the simmering inequities in American suburbs.
Though Herold grew up in “a middle-class white family that passively accepted suburbia’s bounty,” he convincingly argues that numerous factors, including “sweeping demographic changes, rising housing costs, and the vanishing heart of America’s middle class,” alongside the troubling history of segregation enforced by structural racism, have created a systemic crisis: “Suburbia is now home to a collision of competing dreams, each of which seems to be crumbling.” In his energetic debut, Herold chronicles how he “traveled the country, immersing [himself] in the lives of families on the front lines of suburban change,” tracking several families’ arcs amid the mostly declining fortunes of representational suburbs, including communities outside Atlanta and Dallas, progressive Evanston, Illinois, and the notoriously troubled city of Compton, California, arguing that these locales each demonstrate a “larger pattern of racialized development and decline.” Indeed, he discovers a disturbingly pervasive entropy in areas across the U.S., including Penn Hills, located outside an increasingly gentrifying Pittsburgh. Contrastingly, the author portrays the “anxiety about the erosion of long-standing privileges” of a conservative white family who moved to a new Texas exurb where they encountered similar strife concerning finances, infrastructure, and education budgets. Herold ably navigates these issues, particularly the divisive role played by school board politics (“public education in America had become a hot-button issue”) and sets the dreams of these diverse families against regional history. The author was still conducting interviews during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which further fractured each community’s social cohesion. As he writes, “conflicts over masks, vaccines, and racial equality were all raging anew.” Herold adeptly manages the sprawling storytelling and subtopics (albeit frequently focused on bureaucratic minutiae) with empathy, varied scenes, and well-rounded characterizations.
A deeply valuable study of the decline of suburbia.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593298183
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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