A significant report on the impact of sexual crime in adult entertainment.
An exposé on the popular pornography site, awash in a myriad of sexual abuse and child trafficking allegations.
Mickelwait, a leading anti–sex trafficking activist and founder of the Justice Defense Fund, explores the rise in exploitative abuse by the adult entertainment industry. Her impassioned report focuses on her discovery that the 10th-most-visited website in the world, Pornhub, was monetizing homemade, pay-to-download, advertisement-supported sexually abusive content—and manipulatively cloaking that material even after its “dirty secret” was exposed to the media. The author delivers the bulk of her chronologically structured investigation via dramatically lucid language and verbatim commentary from content moderators, survivors, and former employees of MindGeek, the company that owned Pornhub until 2023. Throughout the book, Mickelwait provides damning evidence of Pornhub’s incentivization of sexual crime. “I realize Pornhub’s servers are potentially the largest collection of child pornography and sexual crime in North America, if not the world,” she writes. The author chronicles how she wrote an accusatory series of social media posts and media articles urging the executives of MindGeek, specifically CEO Feras Antoon, to be held accountable, which sparked vicious retaliation efforts. “They have no choice but to attack with lies, and assaults on character and credibility to slow the truth about them from spreading,” she writes. “One thing is clear: MindGeek plays dirty, and this is going to be a messy fight.” As Mickelwait delved further into the darker realms of the internet, more shady characters emerged, and she provides disturbingly vivid portraits of the wrongdoers. Thankfully, her initiative has made significant progress in court, but she is clear that the fight against sexual crime will continue. The author is a dedicated journalist, and she effectively sounds the alarm for tighter controls over “crime scene” porn sites.
A significant report on the impact of sexual crime in adult entertainment.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780593542019
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Thesis/Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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 familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.
Portraits in a post-pandemic world.
After the Covid-19 lockdowns left New York City’s streets empty, many claimed that the city was “gone forever.” It was those words that inspired Stanton, whose previous collections include Humans of New York (2013), Humans of New York: Stories (2015), and Humans (2020), to return to the well once more for a new love letter to the city’s humanity and diversity. Beautifully laid out in hardcover with crisp, bright images, each portrait of a New Yorker is accompanied by sparse but potent quotes from Stanton’s interviews with his subjects. Early in the book, the author sequences three portraits—a couple laughing, then looking serious, then the woman with tears in her eyes—as they recount the arc of their relationship, transforming each emotional beat of their story into an affecting visual narrative. In another, an unhoused man sits on the street, his husky eating out of his hand. The caption: “I’m a late bloomer.” Though the pandemic isn’t mentioned often, Stanton focuses much of the book on optimistic stories of the post-pandemic era. Among the most notable profiles is Myles Smutney, founder of the Free Store Project, whose story of reclaiming boarded‑up buildings during the lockdowns speaks to the city’s resilience. In reusing the same formula from his previous books, the author confirms his thesis: New York isn’t going anywhere. As he writes in his lyrical prologue, “Just as one might dive among coral reefs to marvel at nature, one can come to New York City to marvel at humanity.” The book’s optimism paints New York as a city where diverse lives converge in moments of beauty, joy, and collective hope.
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781250277589
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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