Essential reading in the ongoing national re-examination of mass incarceration.
A chilling portrait of America’s “securest and most punitive” prisons.
Opened in 1989, Pelican Bay State Prison, located in rural Crescent City, California, contains 1,055 windowless concrete isolation cells measuring 8 by 10 feet and filled with “stale air and fluorescent light.” By 2010, more than 500 prisoners had lived there for more than 10 years; 78 have been isolated for more than two decades. With no visitors or human contact for 23 hours per day, such inmates face “the tedium, the psychological trauma, the existential terror” of indefinite long-term isolation. Human rights groups call the practice torture. In this deeply researched book, Reiter (Law/Univ. of California, Irvine; co-editor: Extreme Punishment: Comparative Studies in Detention, Incarceration and Solitary Confinement, 2015) tells the full story of Pelican Bay and opens a window on the rise in recent decades of Supermax prisons throughout the U.S., which now house some 20,000 prisoners deemed the “worst of the worst” criminals by prison officials. Based on her doctoral dissertation, Reiter’s book relates the history of Supermaxes, which began as “prison officials’ response to the radical civil rights movement of the 1970s.” Built quietly in out-of-the-way places at prison administrators’ discretion, the facilities were considered a new tool for controlling dangerous prisoners like George Jackson, the black activist and author who was shot to death by guards in San Quentin Prison. Reiter captures the ceaseless misery of daily life at Pelican Bay, where suicide is common and survivors adhere to rigid routines. Despite protests and hearings, reforms have only placed limits on who can be placed in solitary. The author calls the “worst of the worst” criteria a myth, with little distinction made between bad and insane inmates. Failing to end prison violence, she writes, Supermaxes have succeeded only in silencing radicals. Her stories of the psychological impact of isolation—and the experiences of released Supermax prisoners—are both disturbing and moving.
Essential reading in the ongoing national re-examination of mass incarceration.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-300-21146-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
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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