A powerful, alarming portrayal of how poverty remains entrenched in unfairly forgotten places across America.
Disturbing analysis of the persistent, surprising connection between poverty and place.
Edin, Shaefer, and Nelson developed this ambitious, revealing project in a roundabout way, following a prior collaboration examining family-centered poverty (Edin and Shaefer’s $2.00 a Day): “We wondered: Why were so few of our colleagues studying whole communities? Why weren’t we?” In 2019, they started embedding researchers to conduct immersive interviews in “Appalachia, South Texas, and the vast southern Cotton Belt running across seven states.” The isolation of the pandemic also turned the authors toward historical research, and a post-pandemic, 14-state “road trip” to see these places underscored the complexity encoded in unraveling narratives of “place-based disadvantage.” The problem persists, they argue, because of long-term, secretive webs of corporate control, rooted in sudden innovations in resource extraction that immediately require exploitation of mass human labor. “In place after place,” they write, “we discovered astonishing stories about the industries that fueled the rise of our nation, the workers who sustained them, and the histories of human suffering they wrought.” Unsurprisingly, “while some of these were majority-white, many, indeed most, were rural communities of color.” The authors vividly establish narrative and place by organizing the discussion into key subtopics, including the persistence of violence and political corruption. Despite this bleak focus on the human consequences in lived environments, they muster some optimism, talking to activist residents and offering suggestions, including an end to separate but unequal schooling and a recommitment to addressing violence and isolation via social mobility and restoration of public spaces. The collaborative writing is polished and clear, blending dynamic narrative detail and well-organized argument along with the plaintive voices of interviewees. “Great wealth was extracted from these regions in the form of raw materials that fueled not only national but global markets,” write the authors. “Yet from the start, these were also the places in the nation with the most inequality, severe poverty, ill health, and limited mobility.”
A powerful, alarming portrayal of how poverty remains entrenched in unfairly forgotten places across America.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9780063239494
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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