A convincing indictment of elite colleges for reproducing inequality while hiding behind their historical clout.
A potent investigation into how elite colleges and universities in the U.S. perpetuate economic inequalities and fail to properly address the country’s ongoing racial divide.
NoneMany people believe that private, elite colleges reward merit and hard work, and while that may be true, there are countless other factors at play. Mandery—a Harvard graduate, Emmy and Peabody winner, and author of A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America, among other books—plainly shows how “elite colleges are guilty of cementing, reproducing, and exacerbating inequality in America.” Ivy League colleges, and others of their ilk, open their doors mainly to those least in need. “For the overwhelming majority,” the author notes, “they take children who have been the beneficiary of a lifetime of privilege, convert that privilege into a degree of value, steer these students into careers in finance, cultivate disdain for those who work for the common good, [and] systematically disadvantage the handful of poor students of color who manage to make it through their gates.” On the other hand, public universities are “producing the lion’s share of upward mobility” and encouraging public service careers. The trend of excluding talented, low-income students from elite colleges is exacerbated by standardized testing biases, tax exemptions for higher education, the hoarding of endowments, and admissions criteria privileging legacy students and accomplishments (science fair awards, volunteering, expensive extracurricular activities, etc.) that favor affluent applicants. Mandery offers a variety of strategies to counter this problem—e.g., basing admissions decisions on high school rank and increasing the sizes of entering classes. Of course, students attend college for reasons other than status: gaining access to specific occupations, transitioning to adulthood, or just the sheer joy of learning. Living a decent and satisfying life, as Mandery shows, hardly depends on a degree from Harvard or Princeton.
A convincing indictment of elite colleges for reproducing inequality while hiding behind their historical clout.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-62097-695-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A generous, steaming stew of a book loaded with personality and originality and sprinkled with the fiery chili of rage.
A poet’s memoir about her working-class childhood, writing career, family, and Asian American identity.
Despite the fact that Wong’s father gambled away the family's Chinese restaurant in New Jersey when she was still quite young, the feeling of being a "restaurant baby" is central to this book. "I am that person who thinks that the compost bin is beautiful, in all its swirls of color (jade mold, chocolate slime—why is no one hiring me to name nail polish?), surprising texture, and piquant death,” she writes. After her father lost the restaurant and left the family, her mother became a postal worker, sorting mail overnight into and through the pandemic. If there is a single topic that unifies the book, it's her mother. A series of passages labeled “wongmom.com” imagines that her mother's wisdom might be available online, including things like her take on an "ancient Chinese saying”—“If you can’t crawl, swim. If you can’t swim, then take the bus.” Wong's sharp sense of humor is fueled by a healthy dose of righteous anger, and her lyric energy bursts from almost every sentence. In the chapter titled "Bad Bildungsroman With Table Tennis,” she writes, "Part of being a teenager is the desire to destroy something. To break something apart so fully, you can see its pulled seams, its tangled organs. At 13, I felt this feeling churn within me, this rage, this pimple-popping lusciousness of rudeness, this gleaming desire for sudden destruction." She writes candidly about her shoplifting phase, her misery at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and her disgust for bigotry and cultural appropriation. A good portion of the book focuses on finding her confidence as an Asian American poet, including the glorious moment when she was recognized with a big grant and a museum show. For this profoundly unsqueamish writer, poetry is "interior slime spicy along our tongues" and "chicken grease congealing behind my ear."
A generous, steaming stew of a book loaded with personality and originality and sprinkled with the fiery chili of rage.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781953534675
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
A provocative and original examination of the flaws in mental health treatment.
Fay's incisive, wide-ranging debut explores her decadeslong immersion in the mental health system.
Beginning when she was a teenager, Fay was diagnosed with six different mental illnesses, sometimes one by one, sometimes in combination, and often based on the skimpiest of evidence. Therapists and physicians concluded that she was suffering from anorexia, major depressive disorder, anxiety disorder, ADHD, OCD, and bipolar disorder. They prescribed medications accordingly, and Fay dutifully swallowed both the diagnoses and the pills—and then found it nearly impossible to extricate herself from either. The narrative, justifiably soaked with anger but also darkly funny at points, does not follow the course of the usual mental health memoir, in which the subject finally receives and responds to the “correct” analysis of her problems and lives happily-ever-after. Instead, Fay, still troubled, still medicated, stepped out of the loop of therapy and began to refute its basic tenets. The author boldly combines three strands: an account of her trip down the rabbit hole of the mental health system, where she tried valiantly to persuade herself to accept diagnoses that didn’t seem to correspond to her actual life; a dynamic critique of the various incarnations of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which serves as a guidebook for many clinicians; and, unexpectedly but beguilingly, analyses of the ways punctuation can reveal and structure thought. While criticism of the DSM is not new, Fay's position as an insider suffering from the results of its application as a method of analysis gives her a unique perspective. Sharply personal and impeccably detailed, the book is bound to raise questions in the minds of readers diagnosed with any number of disorders about the validity of trying to cram individual experience into what Fay contends are essentially imaginary categories.
A provocative and original examination of the flaws in mental health treatment.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-306868-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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