A rigorous and unsettling discussion of decades of police brutality within New York City’s communities of color.
Taylor (Emeritus, History/Baruch Coll.; Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union, 2010, etc.) writes with an authoritative knowledge of his urban narrative and controlled prose that doesn’t mask anguished urgency about the disturbing topic. The author began to realize that despite renewed focus on police brutality after such flashpoints as the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, even social justice sympathizers lack awareness of the temporal depth of the problem. He argues that since the 1940s, police brutality has “led to civil unrest and mistrust between blacks and the NYPD…[and] a long history of African Americans’ efforts to expose the brutality.” The author documents this through a narrative survey, concluding in the present day. He reveals an epidemic of strong-arm policing in postwar New York, which the era’s black press scrupulously documented and the Communist Party visibly if inconsistently protested prior to the McCarthy era. In the 1950s, mutual hostility developed between the NYPD and the Nation of Islam; surprisingly, Taylor documents how NOI representatives, including Malcolm X, worked to defuse conflicts. As tensions mounted in the 1960s, following disturbances in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, politicians and activists advocated for greater civilian oversight of the department but were thwarted by a conservative backlash advancing a “false narrative” that such oversight was meant to coddle black criminals. Later, Mayor Rudy Giuliani famously embraced tough-on-crime, “broken windows” policing. Although crime declined dramatically on his watch, he displayed racial insensitivity as brutality complaints soared, culminating in the police torture of Abner Louima and several notorious fatalities. In recent years, cautiously progressive policies on accountability and “stop and frisk” tactics defused Giuliani-era tensions, but Taylor remains unconvinced, noting, “Mayor [Bill] de Blasio’s adamant defense of broken windows predicted ongoing harassment of black and brown people.”
An important social history for students and policymakers regarding the relationship between police brutality, urban stability, and civic accountability.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4798-6245-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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