by Joe Domanick ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 11, 2015
Sprawling, engrossing, and highly relevant to the ongoing controversies about policing post-Ferguson, which Domanick...
An incisive examination of American policing, using a tumultuous two decades in Los Angeles as a lens.
Journalist Domanick (Cruel Justice: Three Strikes and the Politics of Crime in America's Golden State, 2004, etc.), associate director of John Jay College’s Center on Media, Crime, and Justice, argues that the philosophical conflicts within the LAPD convey the “larger saga of big-city American policing.” He weaves this complex narrative around several key figures—officers, administrators, civilian commissioners, and gangbangers-turned-interventionists—and events, starting in 1992 with the ugly flash point of the Rodney King beating and the subsequent riots. The LAPD was unprepared for a conflagration stoked by its reliance on paramilitary tactics in minority neighborhoods. Domanick considers this the key feature of the LAPD since the reign of martinet chief William Parker in the 1950s and ’60s. Parker’s protégé, Daryl Gates, was unapologetically provocative, promoting hyperaggressive policing during the violent crack era of the 1980s. In the post-King political wreckage, Gates was succeeded by two African-American chiefs, outsider Willie Williams and admired local cop Bernard Parks. Both failed to address the LAPD’s baroque leadership structure and aggressive tactics, and they were plagued by the flawed investigation of O.J. Simpson and the “Ramparts CRASH” corruption scandal. The city finally turned to William Bratton, the driven, ambitious proponent of statistically oriented policing who claimed credit for New York’s historic crime reductions. Bratton saw his LA appointment as an opportunity to “remake [police] culture into a community-policing model without undoing his broken-windows strategy.” Domanick paints on a broad canvas, often pausing to look at other cities’ parallel struggles with policing and crime. He adeptly balances a complex discussion, addressing both the necessity of proactive law enforcement in neighborhoods plagued by gang violence and the fundamental injustice of the “Drug War” model as applied to low-income communities. While the focus on multiple biographies can become tedious, this is a well-executed, large-scale urban narrative.
Sprawling, engrossing, and highly relevant to the ongoing controversies about policing post-Ferguson, which Domanick addresses in an epilogue.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4107-3
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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by Joe Domanick
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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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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