A fierce and thought-provoking condemnation of the American school system.
Author, filmmaker, and musician Soling presents a manifesto for empowering students in a system of mandatory education.
The author states his case in blunt terms, addressing high-school-aged readers directly and informing them that schools are places of humiliation by design: “By being deprived of free speech and free assembly, you are literally held captive,” he writes. “By being forced to sit in an uncomfortable chair all day long and listen to someone you did not choose to listen to, and read texts you do not want to read, your most basic democratic rights are violated.” In these pages, Soling outlines what he sees as the evils of the educational system, from locker searches to corporal punishment (which is legal in 19 states, and which he rightly calls “sickening”). He also describes the many things students can do to fight such evils, from organizing protests to filing police reports. Although many of the actions that he advocates in this slim work may have significant consequences for students, including poor grades, he repeatedly stresses that they shouldn’t commit illegal acts while disrupting the formal structure of their education. Because the book is polemical in nature, it’s unsurprising that it includes a chapter titled “Bad Arguments in Defense of Schooling”; the author ably short-circuits notions that it teaches interpersonal skills or acclimates students to authority structures they’ll encounter in adult life. For Soling, school is nothing more than “an institution that selectively dispenses information in an incoherent manner within an oppressive construct that interferes with learning,” and he effectively offers no compromise on this point. Indeed, his prose is electric in its passion and anger; even readers who are unconvinced by his case are likely to find themselves rethinking old certainties about a pillar of American life.
A fierce and thought-provoking condemnation of the American school system.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2015
ISBN: 9780990939900
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Spectacle Films, Inc
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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