There is much more to inequality and discrimination than we know, and Crump will open your eyes. Pay attention.
An accomplished civil rights attorney and former president of the National Bar Association exposes subtle, systemic genocide in America.
Crump assails the criminal justice system in the United States as one designed for white, wealthy men: All others are on their own. “This book,” he writes, “featuring many of the cases I have worked on, reveals the systematic legalization of discrimination in the United States, and particularly how it can lead to genocide—the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a people. This book particularly addresses genocide as it relates to colored people.” It’s vital, writes the author, to understanding the terms involved as well as how those terms have been manipulated over time. First, the concept of race does not have a biological or genetic basis. It began in the 15th century as Europe sought to justify enslaving, murdering, and stealing the lands of Indigenous people. When left unchecked, racism, the assertion of superiority in order to discriminate, is a tool of genocide. There are also institutional racism and environmental racism, demonstrated in the plight of citizens enduring poisonous water in Flint, Michigan, as well as legal slavery in our prisons, people innocently killed in police custody or on the street under “stand your ground” laws. Crump consistently condemns the courts’ failures, demonstrating how policing is unequal and disproportionate; as he notes, people of color are far more likely to go to jail for misdemeanors than white people. The Supreme Court has a long pattern of intellectual justification of discrimination and has relied on the concept of states’ rights to throw out cases. Though Jim Crow laws were overturned in the 1960s, new laws quickly replaced them, laws that may be less obvious but still result in voter suppression. Crump rightly warns readers to ignore talk of voter fraud; it’s a myth used to justify restrictive laws. Many readers will be justifiably infuriated by the author’s well-documented findings; hopefully, they will also choose to follow his 12 “personal action steps” to combat systemic racism.
There is much more to inequality and discrimination than we know, and Crump will open your eyes. Pay attention.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-237509-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
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