A well-written, engrossing examination of racial bias and proposed policy reforms.
A prolific author reflects on racism in America in this collection of essays.
Acclaimed essayist and storyteller Townsend has previously written extensively about his own experiences as a former member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and as a gay, White Southerner. But it was only in the past few years that he truly came to the “painfully slow realizations” about his own implicit racial biases. With this book, he hopes to provide White readers with a clear perspective as they grapple with painful truths about racism in America. The collection’s nearly 50 essays, many of which originally appeared in publications like LA Progressive, average no more than five pages and are ideally read as “daily reflections” rather than in a single sitting. The volume is organized into four sections. The first part, which is the most compelling, draws on Townsend’s experiences with “racism by proxy,” whereby White people deflect their own complicity in racist systems. This includes the author himself, who found that “protesting at a Black Lives Matter rally revealed more of my biases.” Essays in this section also include arguments against conservative objections to “critical race theory,” White privilege, and “revisionist” histories of America’s Founding Fathers. Subsequent sections address concrete policy solutions to racial inequity, reforms that religious institutions should implement to address their own sordid histories, and a sweeping vision for social justice that includes the homeless, sex workers, and the LGBTQ+ community, among others. Written in a conversational style that often uses stories and personal anecdotes to reveal larger truths, this immensely approachable book skillfully serves its intended audience of White readers grappling with complex questions regarding race, history, and identity. The author’s frequent references to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may be too niche for readers unfamiliar with its idiosyncrasies, but Townsend generally strikes a perfect balance of humor, introspection, and reasoned arguments that will engage even skeptical readers. Perhaps more attention could have been paid to highlighting the scholarship and research of Black authors beyond appendix materials for “additional resources.” Still, overall, this is an effective primer on the persistent legacies of racism in America.
A well-written, engrossing examination of racial bias and proposed policy reforms.Pub Date: July 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64719-694-3
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Booklocker.com
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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