A damning examination of violence in Black America and a call for intervention that is long overdue.
A deep exploration of why Black Americans are disproportionately impacted by violence and what can be done about it.
There’s more intentional violence in the U.S. than in any other advanced industrial nation. Of that violence, African Americans are victimized disproportionate to their share of the population. This is true across age and gender; among the poor and middle classes; in the street and inside homes. Fatal or nonfatal violence, committed with guns, knives, or fists, the story remains the same, and solutions to this problem are within reach. Criminologist Currie documents our “national failure” to take action and address the root causes of the violence in Black communities. The result of this systemic failure is a “public health crisis of devastating proportions.” Currie painstakingly outlines the dimensions of the problem and examines how violence not only affects the victims, but also negatively impacts the physical and mental well-being of the larger community, putting them at an extreme social and economic disadvantage, which fuels the cycle of violence. “Ending the plague of violence” requires a fundamental change in the social and economic conditions within impacted communities. The author preemptively defends against victim-blaming discourse about “black-on-black crime” by acknowledging the anxiety around discussing these issues for fear of playing into stereotypes about Black people and crime, stressing that “the racial disparity in violence is not a symptom of community failure: it is a symptom of social injustice. And though that injustice is long-standing, it is also both preventable and reversible.” These communities have been rendered more vulnerable due to “enduring discrimination,” extreme poverty, and external indifference. Meticulously researched and densely packed with stats and studies, Currie’s book paints a heartbreaking picture, but it also makes an urgent case for bold measures to turn the tide in Black communities.
A damning examination of violence in Black America and a call for intervention that is long overdue.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-76993-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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