A fascinating, well-researched tale of 21st-century urbanism set in Toronto.
Cohen’s debut nonfiction work chronicles a Toronto housing project’s makeover.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Cabbagetown South was home to some of Toronto’s poorest slums. In the 1940s, these slums were razed and replaced by a 69-acre public housing complex named Regent Park. The crime and poverty that afflicted the original site soon came to affect the new housing project, and in the early 21st century, a new plan was created to redevelop Regent Park as a mixed-use, mixed-income community. Cohen, a real estate developer and musician, was part of the team tasked with reenvisioning the neighborhood in a way that would work for both newcomers and long-time residents—who, temporarily displaced by the plan, were promised the right to return. “There were moments when we had no idea where the music would take us,” writes Cohen. “There were others in which the notes resonated in perfect harmony, reflecting hope, potential, and personal growth. Darker tones often took centre stage, reflecting anger, resentment, and a deep sadness for what had been lost.” This book records Cohen’s memories of the project, which spanned 18 years and three phases of revitalization. From creating pedestrian-friendly streets and new green spaces to fostering new economic and cultural energy, all while collaborating with residents and preserving the century-old history of the neighborhood, Cohen and his colleagues had their work cut out for them. The author writes in bubbly, problem-solving prose, outlining the peculiar challenges of designing a neighborhood to meet the needs of its many residents. Here, he describes when two locals wanted to start a cricket team. “There was, however, one small problem: there was no place to play cricket in Regent Park. Their practices and games were in eastern Scarborough—three bus and streetcar transfers away.” (Athletic fields were eventually installed.) Fans of urban planning and social housing policy will particularly enjoy this work, which includes many wonderful architectural illustrations and photographs. Given the length and the success of the project, this accessible in-depth account of how it came about is a great resource.
A fascinating, well-researched tale of 21st-century urbanism set in Toronto.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781774585054
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Page Two
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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