A literal insider’s view of the troubling social warehousing function of mass incarceration.
Engrossing, intimate account of “city time,” short-term sentences served within New York’s notorious Rikers Island.
Co-authors Campbell and Shanahan term this work a “participant-observer ethnography,” noting they “experienced city time both as scholars studying it and as inmates.” They explain, “We were both arrested for protest activity and were locked up begrudgingly.” Thus, this immersive portrait acknowledges the authors’ relative privilege while exploring how such short sentences entrap many working-poor, addicted, or mentally struggling individuals in a pointless retributive cycle. Though some academic synthesis is present, the book is structured around “its authors’ personal experiences and observations of city time, organized as systematically as possible.” These aspects include not only the physically oppressive environment and endless bureaucracy and rules, but also the “social intake” provided by fellow inmates, a kind of protective institutional memory; both authors learned, and document, that “a complex and often ad hoc inmate code structures social life in countless ways.” Though prisoners’ relationships with the working-class corrections officers are equally complex, they find that “the COs inhabit a malicious, predatory, and dysfunctional social world.” Otherwise, they effectively reveal the daily grind of dormitory life, diversions of work and commissary visits, and the dire mental health care situation. Throughout, their goal is clearly to contrast the resilience of prisoners with “not just the brutality of city time but the banality, stupidity, and waste that characterize every second of it.” Noting that “the onset of COVID-19 caused considerable disruption in whatever normalcy could be said to define city time,” one author describes participating in an inmate strike for better pandemic responses that demonstrated surprising cohesion. The pair are deft and balanced collaborators, writing with academic rigor, as well as humor and compassion.
A literal insider’s view of the troubling social warehousing function of mass incarceration.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 978-1479828999
Page Count: 336
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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