Compulsively readable true crime provoking questions about policing, poverty, and the ritualized brutality of the rural...
Grisly account of unsolved murders in a small Louisiana town.
New Orleans–based investigative reporter Brown (Shake the Devil Off: A True Story of the Murder that Rocked New Orleans, 2009, etc.) spent two years unraveling the stories behind the impoverished, addicted sex workers murdered in hardscrabble Jennings, Louisiana. While media and police inflated fears of a serial killer, the author argues the murders resulted from collusion between corrupt law enforcement and drug dealers, seeking to punish the women for informing. “It should have been obvious all along,” he writes, “that the Jeff Davis 8 killings were not the handiwork of a serial killer…[since they] all knew one another intimately.” Brown focuses on Frankie Richard, an aging pimp whom the author interviewed extensively; although Richard proclaims his innocence, Brown documents connections among him, the victims, and cops who conveniently mishandled evidence against him. His portrait of law enforcement is damning, identifying powerful officials “who were accustomed to maintaining inappropriately intimate connections with those on the wrong side of the law.” Although a task force was launched in response to public anger, Brown accuses them of ineptitude and misconduct; in one startling example, an investigator bought, cleaned, and resold a truck that may have been used in one murder. The author views these seamy details as congruent with a culture of police violence and a regional underground of drugs and criminality that treats such women as disposable; distressingly, the victims themselves seemed to concur, with the mother of one noting, “I think she could feel that they were closing in on her.” Brown’s writing is clear and approachable, and his research is meticulous, even as locals grew hostile toward his investigation (his final chapters argue connections to political figures beyond Jennings). Although he presents few concrete answers to these mysteries, readers will be shaken by the unpleasant implications of a narrative bearing similarities to the first season of True Detective.
Compulsively readable true crime provoking questions about policing, poverty, and the ritualized brutality of the rural South.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9325-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2016
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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