A thoughtful, persuasive call for a truly just system of justice.
A legal activist chronicles the many ways in which the justice system targets the poor.
It’s not news that judicial outcomes are often tied to the wealth and influence of a defendant: Not only do the well-to-do have the resources to hire good lawyers, but juries themselves tend to be made up of older, wealthier, white people. A predictable result, writes Galvin Almanza, is that defendants of color, represented by appointed public defenders, pull longer sentences and are disproportionate in the populations of jails and prisons. Consider, as she writes, that three miscreant white fraternity brothers are not likely to be branded a gang, but three teenage Black kids are. Shockingly, Galvin Almanza notes, “70 percent of people in jails are being held pretrial, not having been convicted of any crime.” The wealthy and white are not usually among them. The author details the many failings of a system so strongly tied to class and ethnicity, despite the purported equality of law. Merely charge a person with a crime, she writes, and the chances are very good that he or she will soon be out of a job, whether summarily or because of having to miss work for endless court dates. Since much public housing assistance is contingent on a clean record, another consequence is often homelessness—and then, in many jurisdictions, being subject to arrest anew for sleeping on the street or in a park. “Bad rules and regulations and policies got us to this in the first place,” Galvin Almanza urges. She adds that there are plenty of remedies available for them: abolishing three-strikes sentencing laws in favor of judicial discretion; expanding treatment and diversion programs; outsourcing crime labs (most of which are within police departments); and otherwise crafting a more humane process of restitution and rehabilitation over punishment, since “the data leads to an unavoidable conclusion that helping people is good.”
A thoughtful, persuasive call for a truly just system of justice.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593799116
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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