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 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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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