A must-read essay collection for anyone invested in racial equity.
The first volume of a collection of essays by former political prisoner and prison abolitionist Davis.
“Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings,” writes the author in this series of striking pieces outlining the scholar and prison abolitionist’s most important ideas. The book begins with a history of U.S. prisons, which were established as humanitarian alternatives to corporal punishment—“convict leasing,” a system Davis calls “a new form of slavery,” through which incarceration transformed into a profitable business. Today, companies like Victoria’s Secret and Chevron pay prison laborers less than minimum wage to make their goods. For much of the book, Davis focuses on women prisoners who, unlike their male counterparts, were historically considered irredeemable and receive little critical attention in the scholarly literature. “Prevailing attitudes toward women convicts differed from those toward men convicts,” writes the author, “who were assumed to have forfeited rights and liberties that women generally could not claim.” In other words, while male prisoners could lose the right to vote, women prisoners never had this right to begin with, so they were punished differently. The collection ends with a series of studies Davis co-authored with scholar Kum-Kum Bhavnani about prison conditions overseas. Although these pieces present alternatives to the American prison system, Davis and Bhavnani emphasize that they should be used to develop a “radical abolitionist strategy” rather than to fix the existing system. In a brilliantly observant, profoundly knowledgeable, and unfailingly original text, the author’s passion and eloquence render even the driest facts fascinating. Although many of the pieces in this volume have been published before, even the staunchest Davis devotees are likely to discover new material and new ways to reimagine a more just world.
A must-read essay collection for anyone invested in racial equity.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781642599640
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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