An intriguing memoir that presents an unusual and necessary perspective on sperm donation.
A story of one man’s discovery of his donor-conceived origin, put into historical context.
Boni, the author of All Hands on Deck (2015) and retired after a long career in the tech industry,offers readers a memoir combined with a short account of artificial insemination’s long history. First and foremost, however, it’s a book about biology and identity. It begins with the author’s finding out at age 49 that his deceased father, whom he loved dearly, was not, in fact, his biological parent. Following this revelation, Boni spent the next 20-plus years working through his mother’s dissembling about his beginnings and, with the help of the Boston Public Library and Harvard Medical School Library, unraveling a mystery. Along the way, he describes the difference that the advent of the internet made in his research and discusses the promises and limitations of services such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com. In the end, Boni learns the identities of his biological father and other relations. In addition, the book offers a thoughtful and well-researched look at sperm donation. For much of its history, the author notes, the practice was likened to adultery and involved a lot of secrecy as a result. The author provides readers with a clear picture of that history, which goes back surprisingly far; however, his mention of how it brought Queen Isabella to the throne glosses over her very mixed legacy. Some of the best parts of the book bring out unexpected connections between the historical and the personal; for example, it details the role of John Rock, a fertility specialist who was behind the creation of the birth control pill, in helping couples who wanted biological children and also reveals that he was Boni’s parents’ fertility doctor. At the end, the author includes an essay about his research and offers additional historical observations as well as a template for a donor-conceived person’s bill of rights.
An intriguing memoir that presents an unusual and necessary perspective on sperm donation.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1626349070
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
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.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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