An impassioned plea for confining bankruptcy to its core purpose of resolving just debts justly.
An exposé of the racial, class, and corporate biases in the U.S. bankruptcy system.
In her first book, Jacoby, a professor of law at the University of North Carolina, argues that bankruptcy has “fallen short” as a legal tool to provide debt relief for struggling individuals and families. Instead, it “entrenches existing hierarchies and power structures.” Under the federal Bankruptcy Code, individual bankruptcy places onerous demands on filers and tramples on their privacy, with Black filers suffering additional discrimination. The bankruptcy courts are more accommodating to businesses, which the author labels “fake people.” Businesses are able to retain their autonomy, and all debts, unlike for individuals, qualify for cancellation. In municipal bankruptcy filings (such as Detroit recently undertook), the courts favor financial claimants over public services. What most angers Jacoby are organizations such as Purdue Pharma or the Boy Scouts of America, which use the system to resolve civil liabilities resulting from the harm—e.g., opioid addiction, sexual abuse—that they have caused. Many of these filings occur when the organization is not seriously indebted. Such cases deny claimants a voice in the resolution, block them from pursuing civil cases, and grant minimal payments or none at all—“a promise to pay is not money.” Although the legal and administrative detail is at times daunting, Jacoby offers a convincing and mostly accessible assessment of how an ostensibly just system can be manipulated to be decidedly unjust. As for reform, she offers only general recommendations such as prohibiting the use of bankruptcy for litigation management and increasing transparency in corporate and municipal filings. Given the prevalence of personal and business bankruptcies and the ripple effects they induce (job loss, family disruption), this book is deserving of wide readership.
An impassioned plea for confining bankruptcy to its core purpose of resolving just debts justly.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781620977866
Page Count: 320
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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