A somber consideration of a broken region that saves the scolding for its leaders instead of its residents.
A former eastern Kentucky journalist clarifies (and debunks) some well-worn tropes about Appalachia.
From 2000 to 2005, Maimon was a Pulitzer-finalist correspondent for the Louisville Courier-Journal, which gave him a front-row seat to the accelerating decline in and around the hamlet of Hazard, Kentucky. The opiate crisis, stoked by rampant and unregulated “pill mills,” was expanding, and the coal industry that supported much of the region was in rapid decline. The author contextualizes those dual catastrophes around a place that has been historically deeply poor and plagued by leadership that has been either corrupt or dismissive of long-term, systemic improvements. “Almost every topic I wrote about in Eastern Kentucky connected back to economic marginalization in some way,” he writes. Much of the book focuses on stories he covered during his stint at the paper—e.g., the murders of two candidates for sheriff in 2002 and the case of lawyer Eric Conn, who was convicted of hundreds of millions of dollars in Social Security fraud for helping residents get benefits for “bad nerves.” (The resulting crackdown led to a rash of suicides, only exacerbating the problem.) But Maimon also brings the story up to date. He underscores the hollowness of Trump’s promises to bring back coal jobs and how much partisan politics have stymied halting efforts at progress. Maimon writes with a journalist’s clarity and plainspokenness; he’s an outsider but never condescending, and he’s accepting that some of the truisms about the region are indeed true. He closes on a skeptical note: Open-minded leaders still have a hard time getting traction there, and Trumpism has set its claws, a mindset exemplified by a popular wrestler called the Progressive Liberal, who attracts jeers when he hits the stage talking about the Green New Deal.
A somber consideration of a broken region that saves the scolding for its leaders instead of its residents.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61219-885-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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