An indispensable contribution to the debate about gun violence.
In a stellar debut, Cox expands his Washington Post series on the invisible wounds of children damaged by gun violence, a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.
In 2016, after the fatal shooting of a classmate at her South Carolina school, 7-year-old Ava Olsen was so traumatized that she developed severe PTSD. She even used stickers to cover up the “scary words” in Little House on the Prairie: “gun, fire, blood, kill.” In this powerful report on the emotional scars left by gun violence, Cox argues that Ava is one of millions of American children “who weren’t shot and aren’t considered victims by our legal system but who have, nonetheless, been irreparably harmed by the epidemic.” With deep sympathy for his young subjects, he probes the roots of—and possible solutions to—the crisis, taking sharp aim at the $3 billion school security market, which exploits parental fears by touting products of unproven worth, such as “$150 bulletproof backpacks.” But the beating heart of the narrative consists of the heart-rending stories of vulnerable children. Ava’s pen pal Tyshaun McPhatter wouldn’t let his mother wash a sweatshirt worn by his father, murdered in Washington, D.C., so he’d remember the scent. Her schoolmate Siena Kibilko, prepared for another shooting, had picked out a hiding spot at school “where she just knew the gunman wouldn’t think to look.” Especially moving is the story of Ava’s 6-year-old superhero-loving classmate, Jacob Hall, killed in the shooting at her school and laid out at his funeral in a Batman costume, mourned at the church by friends dressed in his honor as Captain America and other superheroes. Cox analyzes the gun crisis astutely, but his surpassing achievement in this eloquent book is to let children speak for themselves about their grief. Put this one on a shelf with Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here—and have a box of tissues handy.
An indispensable contribution to the debate about gun violence.Pub Date: March 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-288393-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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