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MAYHEM

Name: MAYHEM
Author: Michele McPhee
ISBN: 978-1-58642-261-5

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE TSARNAEV BROTHERS, THE US GOVERNMENT AND THE BOSTON MARATHON BOMBING

by Michele McPhee ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020

A readable and fascinating, if speculative, work of true crime.

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Boston-based journalist McPhee spins a convincing conspiracy theory out of the knowns and unknowns of the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a hail of bullets four days after the bombing, and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, awaits execution in a Supermax prison. The Chechen brothers had come with their parents from Russia and received all the benefits of refugees, including citizenship. Yet Tamerlan went back to Russia, becoming radicalized; when he returned to the U.S., he swayed his brother to become an Islamist terrorist. By McPhee’s account, numerous parts of the official story don’t quite add up: “I…believe,” she writes, “the federal government actively impeded a full investigation of the marathon bombings, as well as other crimes potentially involving Tamerlan and associates of his.” Among these crimes was triple murder two years before the bombing. As it had done with the notorious Mafia hit man Whitey Bulger, the FBI’s Boston office, writes the author, made efforts to recruit Tamerlan as an informant—which, she continues, explains why he was allowed to travel back and forth between Russia and the U.S. without a passport and without going through customs “even though he was on two terror watch lists.” In exchange for such privileges and a flow of cash, Tamerlan informed on Chechen rebels, some of whom disappeared or were killed soon after. McPhee holds that the Tsarnaevs did not act alone but instead worked with several associates, all of whom are free. Some of her evidence is circumstantial—she suggests, without hard proof, that the brothers were incapable of building the bombs they detonated by themselves—but the irregularities she notes should prompt a reopened investigation, such as the fact that Tamerlan’s wife was never called to testify: “To this day no one in the US Attorney’s Office will say why.” A readable and fascinating, if speculative, work of true crime.

Pub Date: April 14, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-58642-261-5

Page Count: 302

Publisher: Steerforth

Review Posted Online: April 20, 2020

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BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY

From the Pocket Change Collective series

by Alok Vaid-Menon ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.

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Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.

The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Penguin Workshop

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020

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TEENS & YOUNG ADULT NONFICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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Awards & Accolades

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New York Times Bestseller

POVERTY, BY AMERICA

by Matthew Desmond ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 21, 2023

A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.

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Awards & Accolades

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New York Times Bestseller

A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.

“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.

A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.