Devastating revelations that humanize statistics while calling for reform.
Women caught up in California’s criminal justice system share their harrowing stories.
Over the last decade, Leap, executive director of the Social Justice Research Partnership at UCLA, interviewed 80 formerly incarcerated Californian women about their experiences. “I didn’t need reentry services,” one woman noted, “I need entry services—like how do you enter into a normal life?” Much of what the women recount is excruciating. Rosa, for instance, was not only molested as a child, but sex-trafficked by her own mother, who kept her prisoner. At 13, after giving birth to her first child, a gang helped her escape and took her in. “She became deeply involved in…criminal activity in exchange for her freedom.” When discharged from a juvenile detention center, a judge released her to her mother’s custody; this served as Rosa’s final breaking point, sparking years of cycling in and out of jail. In chapters such as “I Thought He Would Take Care of Me” and “Halfway Is Just That,” Leap highlights commonalities of incarcerated women, including childhood violence and crushing entanglements with the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, the latter of which Leap describes as more focused on punishment than rehabilitation. Substance abuse, she writes, was “always about medicating the trauma,” and the reason for relapses is often the fact that “their underlying trauma had never been addressed and treated.” Citing poverty as the primary factor of recidivism, Leap expertly demonstrates why having financial and emotional security is key to sustaining change. “Out of the more than twenty thousand individuals L.A. locks up on any given day, a little over two thousand are women,” and nearly half of the women “are in jail simply because they can’t afford to post bail.” The author closes with a strong case to end indiscriminate use of money bail, and she offers specific suggestions for funding and the extension of relevant programs, which includes community-based alternatives to incarceration.
Devastating revelations that humanize statistics while calling for reform.Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2287-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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