A well-researched beginner’s guide to a growing movement.
A Jewish journalist introduces the fundamentals of the prison abolition movement.
After a career “covering the criminal legal system as a beat reporter,” Lehman-Ewing wanted to do more than just write about the American carceral system’s many failures. Consequently, she joined the organization All of Us or None of Us, where she wrote “a newspaper amplifying the voices of currently and formerly incarcerated people.” This work put the author in touch with an array of imprisoned artists and activists, including Ivan Kilgore, who funds a successful nonprofit called the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation while behind bars; and Heshima Denham, who suffers solitary confinement and other penalties because of the popularity of his abolitionist writing. Lehman-Ewing’s activism also led her to a variety of prison abolition activists like the members of Critical Resistance, who are leading campaigns to close California’s prisons. The author contextualizes the movement with research about such exploitative practices as forced prison labor and analyses of the oppressive systems that perpetuate the mass incarceration of Black men. “It is not enough to learn how we got here,” writes Lehman-Ewing. “We must start to imagine where we go from here.” The author’s passion for her cause and affection for the individuals she profiles makes this book an excellent introduction to the modern prison abolition movement. However, her nearly exclusive focus on cis-hetero Black male prisoners narrows the text’s focus, making the book feel more like a starting point than a complete resource. In her foreword, activist Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X, urges readers to “organize with strategy so that sixty years from now, we will not find ourselves in the same space as we were sixty years ago when my father was alive, simply insisting on liberty and justice for all.”
A well-researched beginner’s guide to a growing movement.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9798889840794
Page Count: 284
Publisher: North Atlantic
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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
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