Transfers impassioned gun control arguments from blog post to book, with limited success.
An online gun-control movement presents its arguments in book form.
Written under a pseudonym associated with online organizing and offline attention-grabbing, debut author Yerguns makes the book’s tone and intended audience clear from the opening pages: “If someone’s more upset by bad words than by a classroom of first-graders getting blown away by a maniac with an AR-15, they are the problem.” The book is clearly not intended to present a measured argument to Second Amendment purists or National Rifle Association members, but to animate gun control advocates and provide a framework for responding to common arguments advanced by gun proponents. Yerguns encourages advocates to pursue a strategy similar to the fight against drunk driving in the 1980s, holding up Mothers Against Drunk Driving as a model for organizing and lobbying, and places the anti–gun-control movement in historical context with a concise overview of the NRA’s evolution in recent decades. Sound statements (“Just as sexual assault needs to be understood more broadly than a masked Bad Guy jumping out of the bushes, it’s equally ridiculous to think of ‘gun crime’ solely in terms of masked Bad Guys robbing banks”) and statistics are mixed with references to “gunhumpers” and more splenetic fare (“And over the last 20 years, Lott’s book of fairy tales has had the shit debunked out of it”). With font changes, cartoon illustrations, memes, and Facebook screen shots scattered throughout the text, the book often has the appearance of a blog transferred to paper without additional editing. Frequent underlined text, apparently intended as a hyperlink but without the inclusion of the Web address, is of limited value. Yerguns advances entirely reasonable ideas with understandable fire. The book’s lack of polish and unsuitability to the format, however, hampers its effectiveness as a tool of advocacy.
Transfers impassioned gun control arguments from blog post to book, with limited success.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 88
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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