By practicing the basic journalistic acts of listening and observing, Macy continues her noble work as a truth teller.
A small-town success story returns to her Ohio home to take account of profound changes.
“It’s not as if Urbana had ever been utopia for me. I was among the poorest kids in my class, and I felt it.” Macy, the author of Dopesick and other bestsellers, made her way out of poverty in the 1980s through a college degree funded by grants that largely no longer exist. Her latest nonfiction narrative chronicles her return home to try to see what would happen to a kid like her today, coming face to face with “the unprecedented forces that were actively turning the community I loved into a poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place.” Her reporting goes deep and wide, including her family members, old friends and teachers, and many new acquaintances. Central among them is recent high school graduate Silas James, one of the teens she identifies as “a modern-day me,” though Silas is trans and has more abuse and trauma in his background than the author. Also memorable are an ex-boyfriend, once the most liberal person she knew, now a strident voice on an array of far-right talking points; on the other end of the spectrum is Brooke Perry, a deeply committed attendance officer whom she accompanies on harrowing rounds to try to get kids into school in a climate where education has lost its place as a tentpole of the American dream. The author does not shy away from tough personal stories, writing about a niece who was abused as a child by her stepfather. Macy goes into the toughest interviews with “trauma-informed advice,” reminding herself that connecting about shared interests and noncontroversial topics will keep these conversations going much longer—though sadly, it often doesn’t change the end result. Black-and-white photos of the interview subjects add an important dimension to the story.
By practicing the basic journalistic acts of listening and observing, Macy continues her noble work as a truth teller.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780593656730
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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