Some scholarly jargon may limit the audience, but Hackworth provides a sturdy exploration of a continuing problem.
A monograph about how Rust Belt cities are struggling primarily because of racist (and often conservative) politicians.
Hackworth (Geography and Planning/Univ. of Toronto; Faith Based: Religious Neoliberalism and the Politics of Warfare in the United States, 2012, etc.) is no ideologue. His extensive academic research led him to what seems an undeniable conclusion: that certain elected and appointed politicians, in city after city, have intentionally suppressed the futures of black residents (and other people of color) to bolster white supremacy. Detroit is perhaps the most egregious example of what the author terms “organized deprivation,” but he also looks at Saginaw and Flint, Michigan, Youngstown, Ohio, Rochester, New York, and other cities and towns. Permeating the narrative is the concept of blacks being viewed as “the other” by whites in power. Hackworth attacks scholars who believe that class differences, rather than racial differences, serve as the primary explanation for urban decline across the Rust Belt. To bolster his quantitative findings, the author explains how black residents have suffered due to overt, law-based discrimination; the flight of white residents and white-owned businesses from neighborhoods with a significant concentration of blacks; state legislatures approving budgets that starve so-called inner cities; actions by police and municipal fee collectors that harm black residents unduly; and judges in local courts who fail to rule in favor of illegal discrimination claims by black residents. Certain results are obvious, Hackworth states, especially the prevalence of substandard housing for blacks, plus widespread lack of employment opportunities that pay a livable wage. Hackworth includes 75 pages of endnotes and bibliographic references to back up his research findings, and the text is peppered with charts. Although some of it might prove difficult for nonacademics, it’s timely reading for troubled times.
Some scholarly jargon may limit the audience, but Hackworth provides a sturdy exploration of a continuing problem.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-231-19373-3
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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