A dose of strong medicine for a society locked into death on the installment plan.
Part memoir, part social treatise, a wholly sobering view of inner-city violence and the codes surrounding it.
Canada, head of the Rheedlen Center for Children and Families in New York City, moves smoothly back and forth between recollections of his youth in a tough South Bronx neighborhood and ruminations on the changing nature of violence. His transformation from a shy, frightened kid into a street-smart young man who could hold his own in a fight is rendered in a wholly believable, step- by-step manner. The sections on his gradual indoctrination into a clique of hardscrabble young toughs are fascinating, as are the reasons Canada gives for the daily fights among his neighborhood friends: "It was the job of the older boys to 'make us tough' so we wouldn't become victims once we left the block.'' Canada sees an alarming difference between the street codes of his youth in the 1960s and those of today. Life has become increasingly cheap, he contends, due to a confluence of factors. Canada argues that the involvement of children in the drug trade can be directly linked to the tougher drug laws instituted by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, which mandated stiff jail time for adult drug dealers. He also provides evidence that gun manufacturers have engaged in campaigns aimed at increasing gun use among children—a chilling example of capitalism at its most cynical. He offers some potential solutions, such as forming a peace officer corps and reducing violence on TV and in movies, and ends with a plea for aggressive action to ensure that America's cycle of violence will not be the only legacy we bequeath to our children.
A dose of strong medicine for a society locked into death on the installment plan.Pub Date: June 9, 1995
ISBN: 0-8070-0422-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Roberts's exploration of the history of African-American women and reproductive rights is brilliant, controversial, and profoundly valuable. The author, a professor of law (Rutgers Univ.), brings forth a view of black women wholly ignored by mainstream America. Beginning with slavery and moving to the present day, she argues that white America has perpetuated a legacy of pathological social violence against black women and their reproductive capabilities. Female slaves, Roberts asserts, were often bought with the express purpose of using them as breeders; white males profited by raping black women and selling their children. Later, in the first half of the 20th century, the eugenics movement turned contraception from a tool of women's liberation into a tool of control to cut birth rates among southern blacks, and as late as the 1970s black women were routinely sterilized by hysterectomies that were not medically necessary. More recently, poor black women living in urban areas have been forced by courts, doctors, and health care organizations to be implanted with the Norplant birth-control device; doctors frequently refuse to remove it on request. Roberts's arguments are especially convincing because they are so well researched and thoroughly dissected. Drawn from documented cases, African-American theorists, and media reports, Roberts's knowledge of her subject is total. Instead of painting black women as passive victims of this reproductive racism, she represents them through the image offered by a former slave, Anna Julia Cooper, who characterizes the black woman fighting to protect the bodies of her daughters as ``an entrapped tigress.'' Roberts outlines an agenda for change in the final chapter, positioning the book as an important stepping-stone toward transforming the way black women and their children are treated in America. ``The denial of Black reproductive autonomy serves the interests of white supremacy,'' Roberts states, and she demands her reader rethink the relationship between race and reproduction.
Pub Date: Oct. 9, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-44226-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This patient's-eye view of life in a psychiatric hospital in the 1980s draws on the techniques of Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted but offers an original perspective on the dubious diagnosis Scholinski was given: Gender Identity Disorder. With a depressed mother and a father traumatized by service in Vietnam, Scholinski had an adolescence marked by physical and emotional abuse at home, teasing by schoolmates about her tomboyish appearance, and sexual molestation by strangers and others in positions of authority. She was turned over to the care of a mental hospital by parents who could not handle her minor acts of juvenile delinquency. Faced with the challenge of diagnosing her problems, doctors at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago decided the short-haired, ripped-jeans-and-rock-T-shirt-attired Scholinski was not ``feminine'' enough. When she became close friends with a new girl on the ward, she was accused of lesbianism. Thus she spent her high-school years locked up and marooned among the delusional, the suicidal, and the schizophrenic, being given ``girly lessons'' in makeup, dress, flirting, and other feminine skills. Former Boston Globe reporter Adams helps create an intimate narrative wherein the complex, ironic voice of the misunderstood young woman takes center stage (speaking of the $1 million price tag of her three-year treatment and her roommate's makeup lesons, Scholinski writes, ``For the price, I would have thought they'd bring in someone really good, maybe Vidal Sassoon''). The reprinting of institutional evaluative documents, Ö la Kaysen, provides effective context for the author's retellings of the hospital experience. Scholinski is now a San Francisco artist and activist who, though she continues to struggle with depression, is free to dress and wear her hair and choose her partners as she wishes. A notable book. Scholinski is a pychiatric memoirist with a powerful voice and a mission: to debunk doctors who continue to diagnose gender identity disorders.
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1997
ISBN: 1-57322-077-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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