A thoughtful and useful consideration of the fate of cities in the age of Covid-19.
A sweeping investigation of threats to urban life.
Harvard economists Glaeser, who specializes in urban economics, and Cutler, who focuses on health care, believe that cities offer unequaled settings for creativity, commerce, entrepreneurship, and enjoyment. “Humanity crafted itself an urban world because proximity is valuable,” they write, even though proximity also allows illnesses to spread easily. The authors examine incidences of contagion throughout history, including plague in medieval Europe; yellow fever in 18th-century Philadelphia; waves of cholera, which surged globally before reaching the New World in the spring of 1832; the influenza pandemic of 1918; and, of course, Covid-19 (some of the data on this virus is unavoidably outdated). “A central theme of this book,” write the authors, “is that the vulnerability of large, dense, interconnected cities requires an effective, proactive public sector: a shared strength that serves everyone.” They suggest ways to effectively enact quarantine, such as an international early warning system, cooperation to shut down international travel, and sequestration of impacted regions. Because the World Health Organization is hobbled by an unwieldy structure, they propose a NATO-like organization to respond to global health challenges. They critique the U.S. health care industry, which rations care through high prices. “The failure to fund public health,” they assert, “is part of the larger problem that our private and public insurance programs are set up primarily to cover acute illness costs, not to prevent disease.” Besides analyzing health issues, the authors look at other urban challenges, such as “overly expensive housing, violent conflict over gentrification, persistently low levels of upward mobility, and outrage over brutal and racially targeted policing and long prison sentences for minor drug crimes.” Among their proposals for measures that would enhance city life are extensive reforms to business and land use regulations, the strengthening of schools, and policing that would “both prevent crime and respect every citizen.”
A thoughtful and useful consideration of the fate of cities in the age of Covid-19.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-29768-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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