An approachable consideration of an unexamined aspect of the failed war on drugs.
Intriguing social chronicle of the DARE anti-drug education program.
Felker-Kantor builds on prior work on policing with an account of the stealthy rise and fall of DARE, which began in Los Angeles in 1983 under aggressive chief Daryl Gates. While often ridiculed, the once-ubiquitous DARE programs, which featured officers in uniform as “teachers,” normalized the presence of police in everyday life. “DARE attempted to give the police a human face,” writes the author, “while simultaneously expanding the scorched-earth policing” of the drug war. Felker-Kantor takes an evenhanded approach, showing how DARE benefited many parties, attracting support from educators, politicians, and donors, as well as police officers who emphasized their bonding experiences with schoolchildren. Early on, few noticed how it concealed the racialized mechanics of “zero tolerance” prohibition and normalized the unnecessary presence of police in schools. In the 1980s, DARE expanded in line with the Reagan era’s conservatism, which “placed the family, personal responsibility, and morality at the crux of the drug war.” The author documents how DARE accrued political power as it was franchised nationwide, becoming a nonprofit in 1987, while gaining corporate sponsors and a merchandising arm. “By the mid-1990s, DARE had become a cultural icon of its own,” writes the author, while ignoring the structural roots of drug abuse and how middle-class suburban students’ experience with the program diverged from that of students from marginalized communities. Yet pushback accrued by the late 1990s, due to both parental backlash and studies suggesting the program did not influence behavior. “The continued attention DARE received, whether praise or mocking, demonstrated the deep impact the program had on American society, politics, and culture,” writes the author. While his central points can be repetitive, his straightforward account of DARE’s insidiously authoritarian growth is insightful and instructive.
An approachable consideration of an unexamined aspect of the failed war on drugs.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781469679044
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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