Powerfully insightful reading.
An urgent plea for a more humane criminal justice system.
Writing with her former colleague Ramirez, Steinberg notes that being a career public defender has meant protecting “those most vulnerable when the government seeks to take away liberty.” In this book, she explores both her reasons for devoting her life to defending “those people” and stories of clients victimized by the legal system. Steinberg credits her drug-addicted father, a man who cycled in and out of jails and mental institutions, for teaching her the importance of advocating for even the most troubled people “because they never cease to be a human being.” This lesson in compassion helped her with the many difficult cases she encountered throughout her career, like the one involving a Russian Jewish immigrant wrongly charged with sodomy. The apparent heinousness of the crime did not deter Steinberg from getting to know her client, gaining his trust and finding evidence of a forced confession. Though she did not win the case, what she learned prepared her for later encounters with police corruption and brutality. It also laid the groundwork for the Bronx Defenders, which the author founded to train young lawyers how to “put up a real fight, center our clients’ voices, and think about our work through a systemic lens.” Her work with the Defenders, combined with her strongly held feminist beliefs, led her to create what she calls a “holistic defender office” in Oklahoma, which has the highest rate of female incarceration in the U.S. Steinberg’s commitment to reforming a racist, xenophobic, classist, and misogynist criminal justice system is undeniably inspiring, as is her unshakeable faith that “compassion restores our shared humanity,” making us “freer and more authentic.” Her uplifting vision will resonate with social justice reformers and any readers interested in the ongoing fight for justice in a broken system.
Powerfully insightful reading.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780593084625
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Optimism Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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