Despite these minor flaws, the book effectively and excitingly recounts real-life fallout from whistleblowing on the job;...
As Block Joy (Whistleblower, 2010) documents in her second book, university colleagues messed with the wrong professor when they sought to destroy her career after she reported their financial fraud.
Block Joy tells an alarming tale of faculty and administrators embezzling funds from a government-sponsored food stamp education program that the author ran at the University of California, Davis. By the time she discovered the fraud, those responsible had drained institutional coffers of $160,000 of government funding. After reporting the fraud, which led to an embezzler’s sentencing in federal court to a year of prison for theft of government property, Block Joy tried to refocus on running her program. Thinking that the university would be pleased with her actions, Block Joy reports that, instead, she was met with vicious (and inept) schemes to ruin her professional credibility and, at one point, to cause her bodily harm. Fortunately, those involved ran afoul of the professor’s meticulous record-keeping, keen memory for detail and willingness to fight back—qualities that helped her win a financial settlement against the institution after a lengthy internal investigation. Readers will find her corresponding moral victory a satisfying conclusion to this tale of professional corruption. The book often reads like a thriller; extremely short paragraphs contribute to the rapid-fire pacing, although overuse of this technique can be distracting. The author also wisely sustains suspense by waiting to reveal who will finally be implicated in the scandal, adding to the story’s tension. Occasionally, the book contains too much minutiae, giving the impression that the author is re-litigating her case in the court of public opinion. A dramatis personae would also have helped readers follow who held which academic position, alleviating the need for the writer to repeatedly explain identities and professional roles.
Despite these minor flaws, the book effectively and excitingly recounts real-life fallout from whistleblowing on the job; Block Joy’s ultimate moral and legal triumph serves as both inspiration and warning about workplace retaliation.Pub Date: July 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482651331
Page Count: 208
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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