A thoughtful, well-researched study of a “critical foundation” of society.
A social scientist argues that we should trust that the things that bind us are greater than the things that divide us.
Despite the importance of trust in every area of our lives, we rarely think about it deeply. Kim, a professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California, has made it his life’s work, and this book examines the subject from a variety of perspectives. He notes that many societies around the world have become less trusting in the past decades, but in the U.S., distrust has reached epidemic levels. Americans have become prone to believing rumors, gossip, and accusations even when they suspect they are unfounded. Now, the default position, Kim suggests, is to think the worst of anyone outside our inner circles. The reasons appear to be connected to the emphasis that the media, including social media, place on the negative. Kim differentiates between competence distrust, where we do not believe someone is capable of doing what they say they will do; and integrity distrust, where we believe that someone is trying to mislead and damage us. Integrity distrust is the more dangerous, although it is often a matter of perception rather than reality—and this points to possible ways to rebuild trust. The offended person has to accept honest differences and be willing to forgive when no offense is intended. Kim admits that some people are simply not worth trusting, but his point is that most are, and we should be aware of the costs of forever remaining offended. Equally, the offender must be ready to make a genuine apology and make appropriate amends. This change of mindset is not easy, and Kim believes that each person must make that journey for themselves. But it is well worth the effort—and necessary if we hope to escape the distrust trap.
A thoughtful, well-researched study of a “critical foundation” of society.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781250838155
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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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