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LOVE LOCKDOWN

DATING, SEX, AND MARRIAGE IN AMERICA’S PRISONS

An empathetic and well-characterized book that will add complexity to debates about mass incarceration.

Compassionate inquiry into the hidden phenomena of prison relationships, particularly the “MWI” (Met While Incarcerated) demographic.

Greenwood was inspired by her own correspondence with a jailed white-collar criminal she met researching her first book, Playing Dead: “Could you find love and vivacity in the ugliest of places? And what are the prisons we erect for ourselves?” She frames these inquiries against the grim reality of this country’s incarceration rate (the highest in the world) and its disproportionate effect on poorer individuals and communities of color. At the same time, the author observes that MWI “prison wives” are often middle-class Whites who are drawn to church service groups or prisoner pen-pal websites, a phenomenon that serves as an example of the complex social realities uncovered here. Greenwood opens with the marriage of ex-soldier Jo to Benny, an affable recidivist with a disturbing background of domestic violence, and alternates between the arc of their tumultuous, ultimately successful union and those of several other couples. These include a retired Canadian diplomat who wed and then split from an American woman convicted of murder, a trans woman and a bisexual African American man serving time in the same institution, and a couple who stayed together following the prisoner’s wrongful conviction being overturned, who “still came home with all the trauma of anyone who has spent almost half his life in prison.” The resilience of MWI spouses is personified throughout by Jo, who observes, “I don’t have any problem waiting for him to come home from prison. Because he’s my husband.” Greenwood makes good use of interviews with prisoners, academics, and others, and the writing is observant, humorous, and even sensuous, as when the author and Jo attend a conference for prisoners’ families and hear frank talk about the realities of frustration and conjugal visits. “For once, they are in a place where people understand,” writes the author. “They needn’t pretend or defend.”

An empathetic and well-characterized book that will add complexity to debates about mass incarceration.

Pub Date: July 13, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5841-4

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 11, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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

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