A heartfelt, authentic guide for combatting community violence.
A stirring account from the front lines of urban violence prevention.
Writing with Gryniewicz, Williams alternates between frank discussions of the challenges faced by anti-violence “interrupters” performing conflict mediation in Chicago’s resource-poor Black neighborhoods and a memoir about his own improbable transformation from a second-generation member of the Black Disciples. Alongside other aspects of restorative justice, the movement gained visibility following the acclaimed 2011 documentary The Interrupters, in which Williams appeared. In the foreword, director Alex Kotlowitz writes, “It’s formally known as community violence intervention, but that doesn’t begin to capture the scope of what Cobe and others do as they walk their communities with an open heart and a quiet fury stemming from their belief that things need not be this way.” Williams later adds, “Community violence intervention is a growing public safety movement that stops shootings and killings on the front end. It uses formerly incarcerated gang members as ‘credible messengers’ to interrupt violence.” The narrative presents a vivid family history, including intense vignettes like his own father’s murder following success as a drug dealer, alongside an ongoing account of the complex networking involved in the conflict resolution efforts of organizations like CeaseFire (since renamed Cure Violence), which provide “a model for this approach borrowed from the discipline of public health rather than criminology.” Indeed, during the pandemic, writes the author, “we moved from solely focusing on violence prevention to serving as community health workers.” Following the police murder of George Floyd and subsequent uprisings, “the community violence intervention model, which I had been promoting for over a decade, reached new prominence.” The complex narrative’s earnestness can drag at points, but Williams is deeply perceptive about brutal urban realities, and he dismantles assumptions rooted in implicit bias with academic rigor and effective storytelling.
A heartfelt, authentic guide for combatting community violence.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781538166871
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“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. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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