An unlikely criminal-justice pioneer revisits his innovative, immensely successful crusade against youth homicide in America's worst neighborhoods.
Kennedy (Criminal Justice/John Jay Coll.) didn't set out to dedicate his career to crime, much less the seemingly insurmountable problem of gang-and-drug related violence plaguing America's cities and stumping even the most seasoned law-enforcement units. Rather, as an aspiring writer straight out of college, he took a job constructing teaching cases for Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. An early assignment on problem-oriented policing sent him to Los Angeles' beleaguered Watts neighborhood, one of many hit hard by the 1980s crack epidemic. Kennedy was struck by the devastating violence he witnessed and, as he plunged further into researching the problem, the horrifying trends it represented. Quickly, a few things became clear. First, guns, drugs and gangs held the keys to the downward spiral. Second, in a shockingly optimistic and humane perspective, that the real problem was, in essence, a massive misunderstanding; that is, that cops and communities wanted, at the base level, the same things, and could be brought together to work toward them. Kennedy and a few key colleagues launched what became known as the Boston Miracle (a name not sanctioned by Kennedy, who emphasized that hard work, rather than divine intervention, created the results). With a massive communication effort, including an astonishing set of forum meetings which actually brought gang members and police officers together, Kennedy's team made clear to the community their goal of stopping violence and valuing the young lives that had previously gone unnoticed. Results were swift and unprecedented—youth homicide rates halved, then quartered, and broad changes were made to communities. More importantly, the solution was not specific to Boston. Over the years, Kennedy has cloned his experiment in cities across the country, from smaller communities like Stockton, Calif., to, with significantly more effort and issues, meccas of urban blight like Baltimore. The problem has in no way been eliminated—and Kennedy emphasizes the drastic consequences when the programs falter—but progress is undeniable. A valuable text—not just for the solution, but also for the refreshing philosophy behind it.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60819-264-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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