A convincing case for criminal justice reform that may alienate some readers.
In this nonfiction book, a reformed sex offender argues for better treatment of felons.
As a young adult, Hardy taught Sunday school, served as a deacon at his church, and was a respected figure in his community. Behind this public facade that “fooled my wife, family,” and friends, the author was a “sex addict,” “manipulator,” and soon-to-be convicted sex offender. After a religious conversion in a suicide watch cell soon after his crimes were revealed, Hardy earned a doctorate, served as a peer recovery coach for the Arizona Department of Corrections Sex Offender Education and Treatment Program, and became the author of an annual devotional calendar circulated among thousands of prisoners across the country. In this book, he blends his personal experiences as an abuser, an inmate, and a rehabilitated ex-felon with a wider commentary on Christianity and the criminal justice system. While sharing the stories of victims and emphasizing the “horrific and heinous” nature of sexual assault, the volume challenges the “myth” that sex offenders “cannot change.” By painting sex offenders as “incurable monsters,” society at all levels, from the media to churches, dehumanizes convicts and makes rehabilitation and reform more difficult. Hardy also urges his fellow Christians to place mass incarceration as a “serious ethical issue” on par with abortion, and apply the religion’s principles of “forgiveness, mercy, and love” to convicted criminals. Backed by solid research and more than 250 endnotes, the book delivers an effective case against the status quo of America’s contemporary criminal justice system. This case is presented in an accessible writing style that combines autobiography, anecdotal stories from both victims and perpetrators, and an ample assortment of charts, graphs, and appendix material. With a target audience of evangelical, traditionalist Christians (noting explicitly that it “is not written for unbelievers or for the ‘casual’ Christian”), the volume may offend many readers with its descriptions of gay sexuality as “sodomy” and a “sexually immoral” sin. And conservative readers will likely be challenged by the book’s discussion of the implications of hardline law-and-order policies.
A convincing case for criminal justice reform that may alienate some readers.Pub Date: March 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63751-167-1
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Cadmus Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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