A riveting collection of magazine journalism by a talented practitioner.
Richardson profiles rare and remarkable characters in his latest set of essays.
A group of prisoners performing original comic plays in for the lifers at Sing Sing Prison. A blogger claiming to be a European heiress on the run and taking the early internet by storm. A deeply Christian doctor who travels from out of state in order to perform abortions in the last open clinic in Mississippi. These are just some of the people whom Richardson has met and profiled over the course of his journalism career, and he assembles these portraits in this volume. The seven essays all originally appeared in magazines—six in Esquire and one in New York—and they read with a raconteur breeziness. Readers will meet Michael Brown Sr., whose son’s 2014 killing by a police officer set off months of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and they’ll learn about the mental health of climatologists who spend day after day poring over grim data about our ever-warming planet. Richardson gets personal, too; in the essay “My Father, the Spy”—later expanded into a memoir—the author writes about his father, also John H. Richardson, a high-ranking member of the CIA during the Cold War, whose bitterness and reticence created a permanent rift in his relationship with his journalist son: “I would bait my father at dinner by defending communism—all your better hippies live on communes, don’t they?” remembers the author. Over the course of the volume, Richardson shows himself to be a skilled weaver of words, as when he wryly describes April 2003 as a time “when winter was still hanging around like tuberculosis and the [Iraq] war was still going strong.” More importantly, the author is a talented detective when it comes to locating human drama. Each essay has a gripping story at the center of it (one piece, which gives the collection its title, was adapted for the 2023 film Sing Sing, starring Colman Domingo) and Richardson frequently manages to touch on a larger truth about the America in which it was written.
A riveting collection of magazine journalism by a talented practitioner.Pub Date: July 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781958861400
Page Count: 182
Publisher: The Sager Group
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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