A timely and haunting look at key elements of incarceration history.
Bernstein, a Harvard University professor and award-winning historian, surveys the origins of the United States’ for-profit prisons in this 19th-century case study.
“American prisons are worksites,” writes the author in an introduction, noting that they generate billions of dollars in commodities and services based on the labor of underpaid (or unpaid) incarcerated people who “do not have the right to refuse to work.” Historians most often trace the origins of such profit-driven labor to the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which banned slavery “except as a punishment for crime”; Bernstein highlights its use more than half a century earlier in an engaging and often infuriating survey of New York’s Auburn State Prison. Bernstein notes how the Auburn’s founders sought not only to punish criminals, but also to “stimulate economic development” with prison-sponsored factories that produced myriad consumer products, from animal harnesses to carpets. In many ways, the book convincingly argues, Auburn created a framework that continues to shape the country’s prison industrial complex, with its inclusion of humiliation rituals (such as a ban on speaking) and its much-imitated black-and-white striped uniform. The book pays particular attention to the case of William Freeman, a Black and Native American young man who was first sentenced to Auburn in 1840when he was 15. Freeman would first defy Auburn’s rules by speaking up against its horrific working conditions, and, later, sought revenge through violence in an incident that rocked mid-1800s New York City. The case is a particularly useful study that allows the author to explore the prison’s policies and engage with the contemporary prison abolitionist movement. The book’s strongest suit is its impressive research, which is backed by nearly 70 pages of endnotes. Bernstein balances her solid understanding of theoretical approaches to American prisons, developed by activist and academic Angela Y. Davis and others, with impressive mining of diaries, letters, newspapers, and other primary sources from the era. The book’s engaging, relevant narrative is accompanied by more than three dozen full-color images, including maps, paintings, blueprints, and newspaper clippings.
A timely and haunting look at key elements of incarceration history.Pub Date: May 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780226744230
Page Count: 288
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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