Mostly evenhanded, occasionally aggrieved, and an interesting angle on the question of political correctness.
A modest treatise defending the right of untrammeled free speech in the face of efforts to silence unpopular opinions.
A public intellectual “of decidedly conservative leanings—and an African American one, no less!,” Loury recounts that he, like many others on university campuses, has faced pressure to temper his publicly stated views and go with the “progressive” flow on campus. That things cut both ways—that moderate Republicans, say, are shouted down in MAGA conclaves—he acknowledges somewhat more obliquely, and with an economist’s image: If Gresham’s law holds, he writes, that bad money will drive good money out of the marketplace, then “people with extreme views can drive moderates…out of a conversation.” The result is then an impoverishment of that conversation and scarcely any conversation at all over questions that demand reasoned deliberation. Speaking to what people want to hear is the definition of the self-censorship of Loury’s title: A speaker may couch opinions in ways that are meant to signal that he or she is on the right side of public opinion, or at least such public opinion as is in the room, or he or she may avoid speaking altogether out of fear of bullying. Again, the result is impoverishment, such that important social problems can’t be talked through without giving offense to someone somewhere. Loury uses an episode of recent history to make his point: Asked to speak at a synagogue in Florida, he “hinted publicly at my growing doubts about Israel’s actions in Gaza,” leading to a chain of angry denunciation and calumny. He might have known, but he risked voicing the thought anyway. “It may well turn out that I couldn’t afford the social cost of speaking my mind on Gaza,” he concludes. “But one thing is certain: if I wanted to maintain my own self-respect, I couldn’t afford not to pay that cost.”
Mostly evenhanded, occasionally aggrieved, and an interesting angle on the question of political correctness.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781509567409
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Polity
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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