A gripping David-vs.-Goliath story that remains suspenseful to the final page.
A novelist and trial attorney tells the true story of North Carolina landowners who fought for justice from a multinational corporation over the deleterious practices of large-scale hog farming.
Addison begins his absorbing and inspiring narrative with a group of landowners, mostly Black, who worked small plots of farmland in eastern North Carolina. Then neighboring farmers began to build massive hog farms, contracting to raise hogs owned by firms acquired by the Chinese-owned behemoth Smithfield Foods, “the kingpin of East Coast meatpacking.” In this page-turning exposé of corporate malfeasance, the author paints a vivid picture of four counties, 5 million hogs, and a hog density “higher than any other place on earth.” The animals are raised in abysmal conditions on farms that disperse massive amounts of noxious waste into the water (through leaky waste lagoons) and air (waste sprayed onto empty fields). The toxin- and bacteria-laden waste and the unbearable smell penetrate everything. Meanwhile, the “hog barons” live far from the stench. After they had exhausted regulatory and political remedies, the landowners retained a small but potent law firm to sue for damages, setting in motion a lengthy legal battle pitting small landowners and their lawyers, scientists, and activists against industry executives, their attorneys, fearful locals, and politicians in Smithfield’s pocket. Though Addison tints his portrayals of the plaintiffs and their lawyers with a heroic glow, he makes a persuasive case that their advocacy took enormous courage. The atmosphere of threat is palpable throughout the book, as the lawyers and their clients are surveilled and threatened. The author clearly explains the legal strategies involved, and he has a good feel for Southern society and the “historical, entrenched, pestilential prejudice” that still warps it. The book reads like a thriller (John Grisham provides the foreword) and strikingly underscores why American courts are so often a last resort for those wronged by structural economic injustice.
A gripping David-vs.-Goliath story that remains suspenseful to the final page.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-32082-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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