The poignant story of an advocate’s journey.
A child advocate recalls her experiences with four siblings from a troubled family in this debut memoir.
The book opens in a Pennsylvania courtroom in 2014, where Savitch appeared for the first time in her new role as a Court Appointed Special Advocate. The case involved the fates of four siblings, ages 2 to 9, whose single mother, “Dawn Johnson” (names were changed to protect identities), had a long history of drug use and neglect. “It struck me that monumental decisions affecting children and their families were made in such an ordinary room with the input of barely trained newbies like me,” she writes. The author recounts her seven-year association with the siblings as she navigated complicated family drama, mental health crises, and bureaucratic red tape. While Savitch is sympathetic to Johnson and sensitive to the socioeconomic barriers she struggled to overcome, the author notes the mother’s antipathy toward Savitch and other caseworkers (“I don’t want you around us,” Johnson once wrote the author in a profanity-laden text message). The author focuses on her relationship with one sibling in particular, CJ, whose problematic behavior—including inappropriate sexual comments to teachers and impulsive outbursts of anger—was often exacerbated, rather than helped, by the various agencies tasked with protecting him. Despite the harrowing depiction of the child welfare system (“This system harmed the most vulnerable, those it was meant to protect”), the book is ultimately inspirational as it details how Savitch’s seven-year relationship with CJ and his siblings helped to shape them into thriving young adults—and how they affected the author as a Jewish woman, wife, and mother, in return. While the text is novel-like in its storytelling, it also provides an insider’s perspective on the intricacies of the child welfare system.
The poignant story of an advocate’s journey.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9798896360926
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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