An impassioned, disturbing and not-terribly-optimistic account of a continuing American crisis.
Synthesis of memoir and polemical narrative from an expert on gangs, based on her research in the bloody trenches of Los Angeles.
Leap (UCLA Department of Social Welfare) has spent years evaluating the various gang-prevention and -intervention programs that have evolved in California since the 1980s. She notes that her credibility among gang members, academics and law enforcement developed because “I am willing to go anywhere and talk to anyone to learn about gangs…I am doing something beyond conventional research.” Yet her personal life became even more fraught when she married Mark Leap, a LAPD commander who initially epitomized the straight-arrow, anti-gangster police archetype. While Leap questions the tumultuous nature of their relationship and her own motivations, she is compelled by a passion derived from sheer grief at the waste and violence inherent in gang life. These complexities frame the discussion of the myths and labyrinthine realities of black and Latino gangs in California. She notes that while popular culture has simplified the topic to “Crips and Bloods,” the pervasive violence associated with gang culture remains prominent, as do persistent social pathologies such as drug abuse and domestic violence. Yet Leap views the young “homies” she encounters as lost souls fleeing impoverished childhoods, noting that “there is no typical gang member.” Meanwhile, “the LAPD has combined suppression with street intervention,” and both approaches remain controversial, with ambiguous results. Leap relies on her intellectual open-heartedness and her personal connections to see her through the many dangerous situations she encounters. Like the documentary The Interrupters, she focuses on the “interventionists”—reformed gangsters who attempt to curtail street violence. Leap’s writing is vibrant and approachable; although her personalized approach at times causes a loss of focus regarding her broader sociological narrative of urban gangs, the narrative is suffused with the authenticity of hard-won expertise.
An impassioned, disturbing and not-terribly-optimistic account of a continuing American crisis.Pub Date: March 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4456-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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