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 hopeful civic sermon favoring inspiration over concrete prescriptions.
A New Jersey senator’s moral manifesto.
Booker situates his narrative in the wake of his 2025 record-breaking 25-hour stand on the Senate floor, an act of physical endurance and moral insistence that serves as its animating example. Though not framed as memoir, the episode implicitly positions Booker himself as a model of the virtues he argues are essential to democratic life. Organized around 10 qualities, including agency, vulnerability, truth, perseverance, and grace, the book advances a clear thesis. “In this book, I argue that many Americans who came before us, and many among us today, have consistently proven that virtues are practical: They expand our power, deepen our sense of belonging, and equip us to endure and ultimately prevail.” Booker illustrates this claim through figures such as the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis, whose willingness to endure sacrifice for principle anchors the book’s moral lineage, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose composure under public scrutiny is presented as an example of dignity as civic strength. These portraits reinforce Booker’s belief that character, sustained over time, can shape public life, even when political outcomes remain uncertain or incomplete. He supplements these examples with personal stories drawn from family, faith, and community, delivered with emotional conviction and a tone that remains affirming and carefully calibrated. Much of the narrative reads like an expansive commencement address, earnest and reassuring, offering moral affirmation at moments when readers might reasonably expect sharper confrontation. That rhetorical choice ultimately defines the book’s limits. Booker acknowledges political conflict and compromise, but rarely examines them in depth, and while urging leaders to take moral risks, he avoids sustained reflection on how some of his own political decisions have tested the virtues he promotes. The result is a principled but self-conscious work that affirms shared values while offering little guidance for navigating power and accountability.
A hopeful civic sermon favoring inspiration over concrete prescriptions.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781250436733
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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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