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 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
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