An outstanding book for policymakers and people who work with adrift young people.
An urgent portrait of a neglected group of at-risk young people.
Americans under the age of 25 grab headlines when they launch flashy startups or become activists for social change. However, as Washington Monthly contributing editor Kim argues in her quietly powerful nonfiction debut, the success of such leaders masks an alarming reality ill-served by current public policy: “In 2017, as many as 4.5 million young people” ages 16-24 were neither in school nor working. Social scientists call them “disconnected youth” (or, in Europe, NEETs, for “not in employment, education, or training”), and many of them have aged out of foster care or spent time in prison and lack the support of trusted adults. A vice president of the Progressive Policy Institute, the author shows clearly how their plight tends to result from years of systemic failures. Some disconnected youth live in rural or urban “opportunity deserts,” which decay as good jobs vanish, or “higher education deserts,” which either have no post-secondary schools or none that teach relevant skills. Others have been unprepared for the transition to economic independence by schools, foster care, the criminal justice system, or government initiatives intended to help them. A striking example of a program falling short is the federal Job Corps, which gives 16-to-24-year-olds room and board in a dormlike setting along with education and training. However, according to a 2018 report by the U.S. Department of Labor, the Corps “could not demonstrate the extent to which its training programs helped participants enter meaningful jobs appropriate to their training.” Among her many and varied examples of successful programs, Kim cites the Latin American Youth Center in Washington, D.C., a drop-in center where homeless young adults can find a safe place to stay during the day—and get food, take a shower, and talk to counselors. Although rich in statistics that support its positions, the narrative is never wonky, and the author enlivens the text with miniprofiles of beneficiaries of high-impact programs.
An outstanding book for policymakers and people who work with adrift young people.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-62097-500-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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