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GOING FOR BROKE

LIVING ON THE EDGE IN THE WORLD’S RICHEST COUNTRY

A penetrating collection that is certain to challenge the readers’ views of those living in poverty.

An anthology presented by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project that explores social inequality and economic injustice in the U.S.

The EHRP is “a nonprofit organization that keeps journalists, essayists, and photographers in the national conversation on economic injustice.” Edited by executive director Quart and managing director Wallis, this collection of essays, poems, and photographs, originally published in leading magazines and journals, highlights the valuable insights gained by these journalists in confronting their own hardships. By publishing these works, the EHRP seeks to mobilize people “to fight for economic justice.” The book is divided into five sections: The Body, Home, Family, Work, and Class. These emotionally charged and heart-wrenching narratives are both wide-ranging and powerfully rendered. Journalists from a variety of backgrounds share their experiences, including a woman who was forced to perform her own abortion following the shutdown of clinics in Texas and a 40-something man who donated plasma in order to pay the rent. One woman was homeless for two years, and she demonstrates the anxiety of feeling constantly on alert as well as the cyclical effects sleep deprivation has on homeless individuals. Another journalist shares how her assumptions about people without houses changed following her experience taking in a couple in Los Angeles. Other topics include inequalities in maternal health care for the uninsured and underinsured; the dangers low-wage workers are often expected to endure, which were particularly evident during the Covid-19 pandemic; struggles with racial identity; and the power of shared community. In addition to the editors, other contributors include Camonghne Felix, Kim Kelly, Elizabeth Rubin, Michelle Tea, Mitchell S. Jackson, and Astra Taylor. “The writers represented here,” writes Quart, “may have lost their jobs, their homes, or even the narrative thread of their lives, but in confronting those hardships they have gained valuable insights into problems facing millions in this country.”

A penetrating collection that is certain to challenge the readers’ views of those living in poverty.

Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023

ISBN: 9781642599657

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023

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THE MESSAGE

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.

Bearing witness to oppression.

Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024

ISBN: 9780593230381

Page Count: 176

Publisher: One World/Random House

Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024

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WAR

An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.

Documenting perilous times.

In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”

An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024

ISBN: 9781668052273

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: tomorrow

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