A highly readable and informative introduction to managing workplace harassment.
A debut guide deals with workplace sexual harassment.
In this self-help book, Lawrence—a lawyer-turned–sports journalist who sued ESPN, charging that she suffered harassment while working there—addresses a predominantly young and female audience. She explains what sexual harassment is, how to combat it, and how to respond to it. The manual dissects the different forms harassment may take, the people who enable and perpetuate it, and the possible outcomes for women who challenge it both privately and publicly. With references to some of the well-known harassment cases of the last few years as well as situations that have been less widely publicized, the volume presents a comprehensive picture of the problem in professional settings. In addition to the practical and professional impacts of harassment, the book also explores the psychological effects, offering suggestions for managing and getting help if necessary. The author also touches on intersectionality and power dynamics as factors in harassment and the work environment. Although men’s harassment of women is the guide’s primary focus, men’s victimization is discussed as well; the book features cases of women committing and perpetuating harassment. Readers will either find Lawrence’s casual style of writing breezy and conversational or overly slangy and millennial-pandering (perpetrators are referred to throughout as “harassholes”; phrases like “Chloe from college doesn’t have it all together despite how gorge she looks on the Gram” pepper the text). But even those who prefer a different narrative voice will find it easy to follow the volume’s ample information, with end-of-chapter summaries and callout boxes highlighting key points. The manual is realistic in its approach, examining the many levels of problematic, inappropriate, and dangerous behavior as well as the consequences victims may face if they complain to superiors or pursue litigation. For those who are new to the workplace, the book is a useful look at a common hazard that delivers pragmatic advice and effective solutions without sensationalism or fearmongering.
A highly readable and informative introduction to managing workplace harassment.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-08411-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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