A unique addition to the literature on structural racism and police brutality.
A disturbing study of how racialized pseudo-science led to “the medicalization of police violence.”
In a synthesis of academic critique and memoir that incorporates elements of postcolonial and religious studies, Beliso-De Jesús, a professor of American studies at Princeton, unearths the little-known narrative of how law enforcement and public health officials found reciprocal benefit in a dubious theory: “The haunting started when I was researching the policing of Afro-Latiné religions and came across a little-known cause-of-death classification called excited delirium syndrome.” The author calls out Charles Wetli, a Miami medical examiner who “coined the term excited delirium syndrome in 1985,” arguing that the symptoms “resulted from low-level drug toxicity and purportedly led to the death of people in police custody.” However, notes the author, “almost all these deaths occur during police interactions, and they almost always involve police use of force.” Her judgment of Wetli’s role is appropriately unsparing: “Wetli blamed the victims of police violence, who ended up on his medical examiner’s table, for their own deaths,” and he also dismissed serial killings of Black women as related to drug use. Structurally, Beliso-De Jesús ranges widely, reflecting her urgency and personal investment and also the complexity of related topics, including the role of the 1980 Mariel boatlift of Cuban immigrants and more recent events like the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. The author uncovers a cottage industry of so-called expert testimony, absolving police in excessive force cases by relying on Wetli’s discredited theories and supported by entities like the manufacturer of the allegedly nonlethal Taser. “Excited delirium syndrome seems designed to distract from this type of excessive use of force,” she writes in an occasionally repetitive yet dramatic discussion featuring intriguing true-crime aspects.
A unique addition to the literature on structural racism and police brutality.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781478030553
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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