Profound reflections on the unacknowledged inhumanity of the nation’s prisons.
What prisoners can tell us about the true costs of incarceration.
This book brings together—and provides edifying commentary on—a selection of writings by incarcerated Americans who reflect on their experiences as inmates. Larson, a professor of literature and co-founder and director of the American Prison Writing Archive, seeks to “reassess law, crime, punishment, and justice, and the triggers between them.” This is a consistently searing indictment of the ways in which prisons harm prisoners, as well as their families and communities, while doing little to fulfill the institution’s ostensible objectives: enacting appropriate retribution, promoting rehabilitation, containing criminality, and deterring future offenses. The author frames prisoners’ writings with revealing accounts of the original goals of the American penitentiary system, its evolution and divergence from foreign models, and the contemporary political dynamics driving policies of mass incarceration. Larson ably demonstrates the cruelty and illogic of prison environments, which systematically dehumanize the incarcerated and preclude possibilities for genuine atonement. “A convicted person, once confined, must identify with the person they were outside in order to acknowledge that it was their actions for which punishment is being imposed,” writes the author. “Yet imprisonment aggressively severs life inside from life outside.” Many of the writers, he notes, “describe manufactories of indiscriminate personal and social disaster.” Larson makes abundantly clear the moral significance of bridging that divide and harmonizing the stated ideals of the justice system with its actual functions. Also compelling are the suggestions given for plausible reforms, including the incorporation of prisoners’ stories into legal training so that lawyers might better comprehend the stakes involved in sentencing. As this compelling text shows, filling in longstanding silences about what prisons actually do may have far-reaching and desperately needed benefits for those inside and outside the institution’s walls.
Profound reflections on the unacknowledged inhumanity of the nation’s prisons.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781479818006
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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