by George L. Kelling & Catherine M. Coles ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 6, 1996
A thoughtful reexamination of crime prevention. There are any number of ideas out there on how to fight crime, but few have proven so successful as the strategy articulated by crime consultant Kelling and James Q. Wilson in a groundbreaking 1982 article, The Police and Neighborhood Safety. While traditional policing has concentrated on reacting to crime, Kelling and Wilson argued for a more proactive approach. Using the now famous analogy of the ``broken window'' (a broken window leads to more broken windows which lead to graffiti, etc., creating an atmosphere conducive to criminal behavior), they argued that by attacking the quality-of-life crimes traditional policing has largely ignored- -such as public drunkenness and aggressive panhandling—more serious crimes would be deterred. Several cities, most notably New York, which have experimented with these ideas have enjoyed impressive drops in crime. Using these success stories, Kelling and Coles, a lawyer and anthropologist, further elaborate on the practice of ``broken window'' policing and on how to identify and combat specific sources of disorder. Thus, the authors favor more beat cops, more community self-policing, and greater police targeting of public intoxication as well as antisocial behavior typically associated with the homeless. While the authors stress that they are not anti-homeless, they believe that practices such as camping in public spaces and aggressive panhandling are the chief ``broken windows'' in society today. This assertion leads to long—often tedious—discussions of the fate of various cities' anti-panhandling statutes and how to draft laws that might survive challenges on civil-liberties grounds. Not sure if it wants to be a dry, academic monograph, or a more popular account, this book suffers from a certain unevenness of tone. While statistical backing for the authors' specific assertions is light, their larger program appears to have worked wonders wherever it has been tried. This may very well be the future of policing. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 6, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-82446-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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
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