by Mark Costanzo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 18, 1997
A polemic maintaining that the death penalty is cruel and unfair, that it doesn't prevent crime, and that it can be replaced by a sentence of life without parole (LWOP). Although in his introduction Costanzo (Social Psychology/Claremont McKenna Coll.) says he is attempting ``a critical analysis of the costs, benefits, and consequences of the death penalty,'' he evokes emotion as readily as he does reason. For those who prefer the sensational, he describes death-row existence, executions gone awry, and the grief of having a family member sentenced to death. For those preferring to build arguments, he suggests some useful points: Death-penalty trials and appeals are so long, complicated, and expensive that we can save money by abolishing execution; having a court-appointed lawyer and being black (especially if the victim is white) increase a defendant's chances of being sentenced to death; the death penalty is ineffective as a deterrent, because most murders are not premeditated acts but crimes of passion. In its better moments, the book gathers from other sources glimpses of the legal system that will give a reader pause, e.g., the judge who instructed a jury to weigh ``mitigating'' and ``aggravating'' factors when determining a sentence but refused to tell jurors what the words meant. Less impressive are times one suspects gaps in the presentation, most problematically in the endorsement of LWOP to replace the death penalty. Costanzo notes some people's fear that those who have, in his words, committed ``murders so vile that they defy understanding'' can someday walk free and adds that ``most judges'' won't assure jurors that the LWOP sentence precludes eventual release. However, rather than exploring this judicial reluctance, he blithely insists that LWOP constitutes an ``ironclad guarantee'' that such murderers will stay in prison. For some, Costanzo's guarantee may not suffice. This volume is as likely to annoy as to persuade those who support the death penalty, but its opponents will find a disappointingly modest handful of ammunition. (For another look at the death penalty, see John D. Bessler, Death in the Dark: Midnight Executions in America, p. 1424.)
Pub Date: Nov. 18, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15559-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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