A hauntingly cleareyed and poignant memoir with strong, illustrative reportage.
A journalist examines the forces that allowed her to escape the limitations of a rural upbringing but caused a beloved friend to fall into poverty and despair.
Driven to understand why poor, uneducated White women were dying at higher rates than ever before, Potts, a senior politics reporter for FiveThirtyEight, went back to her Ozark hometown to live and work. Her professional interest in the subject belied a more personal reason for her return. Until she left to attend Bryn Mawr, Potts had spent her childhood and adolescence growing up among the very women she was now studying. Darci, a smart girl with numerous prospects, had been her best friend. However, Darci also grew up with a mother who did not set behavioral boundaries and often relied on “God’s plan” to see her through difficulties, including her volatile marriage to Darci’s father. By contrast, the author had far stricter and more grounded parents. The Potts family centered their lives on their daughters’ success, and they moved out of town to keep them away from the wayward boys, drugs, and alcohol that could prevent them from getting an education. A set of fortuitous accidents offered Potts the opportunity to attend a Barnard pre-college summer program, which opened doors that allowed her to attend an elite college far from her hometown. In the meantime, pregnancy and a descent into drugs and alcohol led Darci to drop out, after which she began a heartbreaking slide into poverty, mental illness, violent relationships, and repeated incarceration. Potts pointedly examines the complicated relationship between two childhood friends who experienced radically different life outcomes, and she creates a compelling sociological and cultural portrait that illuminates the silent hopelessness destroying not just her own hometown, but rural communities across America.
A hauntingly cleareyed and poignant memoir with strong, illustrative reportage.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780525519911
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
A powerful reiteration of principles—and some fresh ideas—from the longest-serving independent in congressional history.
Another chapter in a long fight against inequality.
Building on his Fighting Oligarchy tour, which this year drew 280,000 people to rallies in red and blue states, Sanders amplifies his enduring campaign for economic fairness. The Vermont senator offers well-timed advice for combating corruption and issues a robust plea for national soul-searching. His argument rests on alarming data on the widening wealth gap’s impact on democracy. Bolstered by a 2010 Supreme Court decision that removed campaign finance limits, “100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion” on 2024 elections. Sanders focuses on the Trump administration and congressional Republicans, describing their enactment of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” with its $1 trillion in tax breaks for the richest Americans and big social safety net cuts, as the “largest transfer of wealth” in living memory. But as is his custom, he spreads the blame, dinging Democrats for courting wealthy donors while ignoring the “needs and suffering” of the working class. “Trump filled the political vacuum that the Democrats created,” he writes, a resonant diagnosis. Urging readers not to surrender to despair, Sanders offers numerous legislative proposals. These would empower labor unions, cut the workweek to 32 hours, regulate campaign spending, reduce gerrymandering, and automatically register 18-year-olds to vote. Grassroots supporters can help by running for local office, volunteering with a campaign, and asking educators how to help support public schools. Meanwhile, Sanders asks us “to question the fundamental moral values that underlie” a system that enables “the top 1 percent” to “own more wealth than the bottom 93 percent.” Though his prose sometimes reads like a transcribed speech with built-in applause lines, Sanders’ ideas are specific, clear, and commonsensical. And because it echoes previous statements, his call for collective introspection lands as genuine.
A powerful reiteration of principles—and some fresh ideas—from the longest-serving independent in congressional history.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798217089161
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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