A convincing and discouraging argument that the Texas model of a profit-making, retributive prison system has become the...
An intensively researched, disturbing history of American penology focusing on the state with the largest prison system—Texas.
In his debut, Perkinson (American Studies/Univ. of Hawaii) asserts that criminologists traditionally study early New England reformatories, foreboding public institutions meant to restore wayward citizens to virtue that evolved into modern correctional bureaucracies still pursuing, however imperfectly, the ideal of reform. The author maintains that America always supported an alternative, purely punitive penology that originated in the slave-holding South and which, with the triumph of conservatives after the 1970s, is now the norm. Texas, rural and tolerant of violence between whites, arrested few people before 1865, but this changed with emancipation, when suppressing blacks became an obsessive priority. Unwilling to spend tax money, former Confederate states hired out prisoners to the highest bidder, where they worked as slaves. This was profitable, so when publicity about corruption and brutality forced states to discontinue “leasing out,” they substituted state-run plantations, mines and factories where conditions were hardly better. Class-action lawsuits during the civil-rights furor in the 1960s and ’70s produced draconian court decisions ordering reform. Some improvement occurred but many rulings were simply ignored, and by the ’80s Americans were so responsive to law-and-order appeals, and U.S. prison populations were mushrooming so rapidly, that there was no money to spare. Ironically, writes Perkinson, skyrocketing costs—Texas spends $3 billion per year—have produced the first conservative voices suggesting that matters are out of hand.
A convincing and discouraging argument that the Texas model of a profit-making, retributive prison system has become the national template.Pub Date: March 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8069-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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